Most educated Americans are familiar with at least some aspects of Russian anti-Semitism from their reading; from what they know about the history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; from echoes that have reached them concerning the liquidation of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish writers’ union in 1948-49, Stalin’s infamous “Doctors’ Plot” of 1952, or the harsh anti-Zionist and anti-Israel rhetoric that was a permanent feature of Soviet foreign policy from the 1960’s to Gorbachev. Many Americans, too, have heard of today’s extreme nationalist party, Pamyat, or of the group of Russian “Village Prose” writers who in recent years have galvanized traditional Russian xenophobia and engaged in vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Western rhetoric. Some may even know of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the political figure whom many Russian Jews today call “our Hitler” and who in the 1991 presidential elections captured third place after Boris Yeltsin with seven million votes.

Nevertheless, although present-day anti-Semitism in Russia extends well beyond the efforts of Pamyat, it has been little discussed in the American press over the past two years and is rarely mentioned even in serious analyses of Russian society or politics. Even among Jews, both in the United States and Israel, Russian anti-Semitism seems to have been displaced by the question of whether Russian society at large will crumble under the pressure of hyperinflation and political factionalism.

There are good reasons for this. Over the last two years, none of the actions against Jews threatened by the anti-Semitic nationalist coalition in Russia has, in fact, materialized. Though Zhirinovsky’s rhetoric is repellent, he is widely viewed as a clown by Russians and foreign observers alike. Furthermore, the Yeltsin government itself is emphatically not anti-Semitic, and Jews as a group have prospered under the recent reforms.

So to the outside observer, there appears to be no present threat to Jews as Jews in Russia. Emigration to the United States or Israel, it is thought, may help Russian Jews escape a looming economic disaster, from which they are likely to suffer along with the rest of the population—but there is no specifically Jewish catastrophe from which they need to be rescued.

This was my view, too, when I first visited Moscow on business in early 1992, and initially I saw little to make me think otherwise, despite the anti-Semitic graffiti I encountered in subway stations. It was a surprise, then, when Professor B. Volkov, a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist party and a distinguished academic, commented to me that he thought there would be a fascist coup in a year or two. “Fascist?” “Yes. A military-nationalist coup.” “And what will that mean?” “The first thing is that the Jews will be rounded up and put in concentration camps.”

My reaction to this statement was first alarm, and then skepticism. “If this is what you think,” I asked him, knowing that he was of Jewish descent, “why don’t you leave?” He replied that over the past year he had indeed managed to get his children out of the country—one to Israel, one to France. “My work is here,” he explained. “When it is finished I’ll leave if I can. My children are safe now and I am no longer afraid.”

Although distinguishing between “objective” conditions and mere personal impression is very difficult in the present chaos of Russian politics, every Jew with whom I have spoken on this subject in Moscow has a definite sense of foreboding, if not so precisely articulated a vision of disaster as Volkov. Even if past threats of anti-Semitic campaigns have not materialized, they point out, what will happen if economic conditions should become intolerable? Before, there was still optimism for democracy and the future. Today, there is mounting frustration and despair over a future of which the Russian people in general—and young people in particular—already feel deprived.

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Recent emigration statistics to Israel offer perhaps the most suggestive index of the fear now felt by Russian Jews as Jews. From 1989 to 1992, the number leaving the Russian Federation (Russia) comprised only 27 percent of the total from the former Soviet Union; in 1992, that figure rose to 40 percent, and some Israeli officials speculate that it will go up still higher. If hard economic conditions were the main factor at work, one would expect emigration from Ukraine, where the economy is even worse than in Russia, to have increased as well. But that is not the case. Ukrainian Jewish emigration has remained relatively constant despite the worsening economy there. The difference between the two countries is that in Ukraine today there is practically no public anti-Semitism, either in the media or in political rhetoric.

In Russia, by contrast, though state-sponsored anti-Semitism ceased under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, a kind of black-market anti-Semitism has taken its place. It draws not upon governmental sanction but upon age-old Russian xenophobia and the traditional stock-in-trade of pre-Soviet anti-Semitic obsessions.

Such sentiments are given expression in a variety of newspapers and magazines available in Moscow, often within a block of the Kremlin itself, in editions ranging from about 10,000 to 200,000 printed copies. (Russian publications usually list such data on the last page of each number.) The names of some of these publications appear below, along with print-run figures and symbols indicating their editorial character: N=nationalistic; R=religious; AS=anti-Semitic; C=Communist:

In these newspapers and magazines, nationalist sentiment feeds upon a hatred of foreigners, minorities, Jews, and the West. Virtually all agree on a constellation of extremist ideas, among which are included the following:

• The assertions to be found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are essentially true even if the document itself might be a forgery; thus,
• There is a worldwide Zionist/Jewish conspiracy;
• U.S. foreign and domestic policy is controlled by Zionist interests;
• Jews control the news media;
• Jews fomented the Bolshevik Revolution, profited from it, and suppressed the Russian masses;
• Jews are arch-capitalists and economic manipulators who profit most from the present situation in Russia;
• Jewish culture—“Talmudism”—is degenerate, immoral, and perverted;
• The Holocaust was financed by Jews to gain world sympathy for the creation of Israel;
• There is no real anti-Semitism in Russia—rather, anti-Jewish feeling is itself the result of Jewish exclusivism and immoral behavior;
• The Russian state should be for Russians;
• For all the above reasons, Jews are natural enemies of the state;
• Yeltsin is controlled by worldwide Jewry.

Frequently-cited corollaries to these basic propositions are:

• Hitler was innately well-disposed to Russia; or, conversely,
• Yeltsin and Gorbachev have simply implemented and fulfilled Hitler’s plans to destroy the Soviet Union;
• Yeltsin has Jewish relatives, including his wife and his uncle;
• There have been at least six million Palestinian victims of Israel’s Jewish fascism;
• Jewish suffering in World War II was deserved, largely self-inflicted, and exaggerated.

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These various slanders do not form a single, coherent ideology. Communist nationalist newspapers, for example, differ from the straightforwardly anti-Semitic nationalist newspapers over the character of Hitler, while the more religious papers, like Pamyat, fuse their nationalistic fervor to a pre-Soviet ideal. In some instances Jews (“Yids” or “kikes”) are linked with other foreigners or ethnic minorities such as Tatars, Gypsies, or Caucasians; at other times, Jews are signified only through the code word “Zionism.”

It is also important to note that although in its visual iconography this literature is identical to Nazi propaganda sheets like Der Stuermer, the literature itself—to the extent that I have seen it—does not equate Jews with a biologically inferior or corrupt race and does not appear to rely on “race-thinking” as much as it does on nationalistic ethnocentrism. The fact that the verbal rhetoric does not match the iconology further demonstrates the confused, somewhat indeterminate state of current Russian anti-Semitism.

Here are some excerpts:

Kikes [“zhidi”]—This word designates persons of Jewish origin (independent of national affiliation) in whom the fiercest hatred for the rest of humanity is concentrated. [Russkoye Voskriseniye, No. 7/15]

The entire history of kikedom is the history of the robbery, the oppression, and the destruction of other peoples: Arabs in Palestine, Russians in Russia, Indians in America, Negroes in Africa (through slavery), Chinese in Asia (through the opium wars). [Russkoye Voskriseniye, No. 7/15]

When Yeltsin arrived in America, all the newspapers notified Americans that Yeltsin’s wife was—Jewish. “One of ours has arrived!” crowed the Jewish press. But what is necessary for Americans to know is not offered to Russians. For Russians, Yeltsin’s spouse must appear as a modest Russian woman. . . . Nevertheless, the fact that Naina Yosefovna is Jewish is already known to many. [There follows a list of prominent Bolsheviks who supposedly had Jewish wives: Kirov, Andreyev, Voroshilov, Kalinin, Molotov, Rykov, Bukharin, Stalin, and Khrushchev.] [Russkoye Dyelo, November 1992]

On July 29, 1991. . . . there suddenly appeared in Moscow 200 rabbinical Hasidim, envoys of the Lubavitcher rebbe, the same group which in the first part of the 18th century. . . . began the extremist movement within Judaism known as Hasidism. . . . In the era before Gorbachev this group was known simply as Jewish Nazism or Jewish fascism. . . . [Puls Tushina, September 1991]

We have reached a critical moment in the fate of our state. . . . Why are we standing now at this great abyss?. . . . As is well known, in the 1980’s an opposition movement formed, calling itself “democratic,” although it had nothing in common with the truth of democracy. Its main ideologues and leaders were people with anti-Russian, anti-patriotic world views, and with pro-American, pro-Zionist orientations. [Nasha Rossiya, July 1992]

On Russian soil there is now a war going on against the Russian people! It is perhaps time to comprehend that the Zionist-Caucasian Mafia insolently pillages the Russian people by inflating prices and exporting goods abroad, thus depleting our internal markets!!

It is perhaps time to remember the fate of the Russian officer corps, destroyed after 1917 by the Zionist-Bolshevik government—and to think as one about the fate of the present Russian officer corps!! [Russkiye Vedomosti, December 1992]

We Russians today are the poorest, the lowest in our rich country. We—without a Russian state—are a nation without a future, and a people without a face.

We live in our age-old land without our own state and find ourselves at the mercy of Zionists, like the American Indians. [Russkiye Vedomosti, December 1992]

Who actually gained leadership [in 1918]? The facts testify that in 1917, of 556 individuals occupying the highest party and state positions, 448 were Jews; the remainder—Lettish [Latvian], Armenian, etc. But there were practically no Russians. . . . The situation did not change in successive years. On one side—the destruction of the priesthood and the peasantry; on the other side—the almost complete absence of Russians in the leadership of the Bolshevik party of the Soviet government and in the organs of punitive repression. [Russkii Poryadok, February 2, 1993]

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Who actually reads these newspapers? No one can say with much clarity, but it appears that the younger generation, which lacks a sense of history on the one hand and feels robbed of a future on the other, makes up a sizable percentage of susceptible readers.

Are the papers an independent phenomenon, or is something more sinister going on? A lead story in the newspaper Russkii Poryadok (“Russian Order”), dated February 2, 1993, declares that the “Symbol of the Future Russia” will be a variation on the swastika. In the same issue, the front-page editorial is entitled “Nationalism or Patriotism: On the Inevitability of a National Revolution.” As it happens, one of the apparent propaganda goals of at least some factions in the KGB today is to encourage people to think that Gorbachev and Yeltsin have implemented Hitler’s plans to dismantle the Soviet Union into various ethnic enclaves—the point of this charge being to discredit Yeltsin and turn people against his reforms. A version of this is forcefully and opportunistically presented in the February 2 editorial, which also accuses Jews of having led the Bolsheviks to victory and of masterminding the destruction of Mother Russia.

In a special issue of Molniya published in late 1992 under the title Dubinushka (“The Cudgel”), a feature article articulates more precisely the same KGB line. Entitled “Fascism—The Plans for the Subjugation and Extermination of the Russian People,” the article concludes:

Thus, Hitler’s aims and methods for the complete destruction of Russia and the subjugation of her people by external occupation fully agree with the aims and methods of Yeltsin’s internal occupation.

The coincidence between these newspaper editorials and the interests of the KGB gives some credence to the widespread suspicion that Pamyat and other nationalist organizations are secretly funded by the KGB. Yet the fact that the KGB’s views are represented in both a fascist-nationalist publication like Russkii Poryadok and a Communist-nationalist publication like Dubinushka illustrates the present disorder of Russian political alliances. A former United States intelligence officer put it to me this way:

Russia is still at a point prior to serious cadre-building by any group. The question in the end will be who will train and equip the cadres which will seize power? Who will pull the trigger? Right now there isn’t anyone to pull the trigger.

As long as Boris Yeltsin remains in power, all these expressions of perversity can perhaps be dismissed as mere flowers of evil. But it is precisely the widespread feeling, recently tested yet again, that Yeltsin may lose his struggle for power that causes alarm. If Russia truly “unravels,” there will be some who will energetically claim that the Jews are destroying the country. And if Yeltsin’s government should be replaced by one in which the alliance of nationalist and fascist elements plays a larger role, Russian Jews may well face much more than verbal abuse from the extremist press.

Even those Russian Jews without Professor Volkov’s specific premonitions of disaster are trying to ensure that their children can have a future outside of Russia. One woman said to me, “My eyes have grown small with crying” for the daughter she had sent off to an aunt in Chicago. She has another child, too young to emigrate by himself. “Why don’t you all leave?” I asked. She answered, “What am I or my husband to do? Can he teach in America or Israel? Can I practice medicine? We will leave if things get worse.”

Tanya Ozmanova, a skilled translator with a small son and unwell, elderly parents, made perhaps the greatest impression on me with her recitation of the simple but terribly complex human situation in which many Russian Jews now find themselves:

I cannot go to Israel with my parents [both of whom are distinguished academics]. What will they do? What will I do? Here I have a reputation. Work. I have some sort of life. In Israel I would have no chance. And is Israel really that secure anyway? As soon as Saddam Hussein or some other madman gets an atomic bomb, probably furnished compliments of ex-Soviet scientists, won’t Israel be the first target?

Tanya’s seven-year-old son has been harassed at school, and a note, scrawled in a child’s hand and reading, “Jews go to Israel,” was recently pinned to her front door. “When it gets worse,” Tanya told me, “I’ll apply to go to Israel. If I could come to America now, I would leave. But I can’t go to America because we don’t have a first-degree relative.”

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To a rational observer it seems plain enough that if a threat is real, one must pick up and leave; if one does not, then the threat cannot be real. The situation in Russia, however, does not yield so readily to logical categories. For one thing, the objective conditions are uncertain and therefore difficult for anyone, either in Russia itself or abroad, to assess. But also, for Jews contemplating exodus from Russia this is not simply a job transfer, not a matter of the rational assessment of opportunities, but a change in destiny.

Tanya is a highly intelligent woman nearly my age. The combination of surnames in her family is similar to the combination in mine. Her forebears come from the same mix of Ukrainian and Bessarabian localities as do mine. As I spoke with her, I thought: our fates could well have been reversed. My grandparents left impoverished circumstances to seek their fortunes in the U.S. What must it take, by contrast, to acknowledge that all one has done—all the personal accomplishments, the worldly goods, the reputation one has achieved—is precisely nothing?

I asked Tanya if she felt any objective danger for herself as a Jew. Her reply seemed to me to sum up the entire dilemma, political and existential, that Jews like her confront in today’s Russia:

First of all, I feel threatened as a democratically oriented person of the intelligentsia. But I know for sure that if something does happen, the first group threatened will be Jews.

Why? Because the national question is the great question for Russia today. That is something that will play politically if there’s a collapse. Zhirinovsky is a clown but a dangerous clown, capable of becoming something very bad if the conditions are right. There is today no objective danger, but if things change drastically, all that will change as well.

So what can I do? I don’t want to panic, and my friends feel the same way. To live expecting disaster is impossible. My Russian friends—and I have many—are sympathetic, but it’s a subject we don’t really discuss anymore because I feel uncomfortable about it with them. They say to me, “At least you have somewhere to go. We don’t.”

Russians will have to find scapegoats for disaster, because that’s the way we think. Jews will be the obvious scapegoats. It’s an old story. I believe in fate, but I hope for the best and act like an ostrich.