Putin Is Worried, So He Turned to Anti-Semitism
After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, an underground joke from my Moscow youth declared, the Politburo found three envelopes on the Soviet dictators desk. The first, inscribed Open after my death, contained a letter telling his successors to place his body next to Lenins in the Red Square Mausoleum. Open when things get bad, read the second envelope, and the note inside said, Blame everything on me! The third envelope, marked Open when things get really bad, commanded, Do as I did!
Things must be really bad for Russian President Vladimir Putin, because he is resorting to one of Stalins preferred ways of holding on to power: appealing to anti-Semitism. Recently, Putin has made a series of remarks dwelling on the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. And in a discussion at an economic forum earlier this month, Putin mocked Anatoly Chubais, a half-Jewish former Kremlin adviser who fled Russia after its invasion of Ukraine last year and is reportedly living in Israel. He is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais, Putin said, using his former aides first name and patronymic. He is Moshe Izrayilevich, or some such.
As a scholar who has been studying Soviet and Russian politics for decades; who discusses that subject regularly with friends, family members, and professional colleagues; and who keeps tabs on what Putins critics say about him, I cannot remember him publicly trafficking in anti-Semitism before now. Indeed, his seemingly benevolent attitude toward his Jewish subjects made him unusual among Russian leaders. For more than a century until 1917, Jews in the Russian empire were confined to the Pale of Settlement, mostly in what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania, and were terrorized by periodic pogroms. Early in the 20th century, the czars secret police propagated (and are widely suspected of sponsoring) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vicious anti-Semitic forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and has inspired generations of violent anti-Semites.
Stalin capitalized on that history to consolidate his own control of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1940s, after 20 million Soviet citizens had died in World War II and millions more were starving and homeless, he unleashed a national anti-Semitic campaign, complete with the frenzied unmasking of rootless cosmopolitanswhom everyone understood to be Jewsin newspapers. Well-known members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, formed during the war to organize international support for the Soviet military effort, were arrested, tortured, and executed. In what became known as the Doctors Plot, a predominantly Jewish group of physicians ministering to the Kremlin leadership was accused of poisoning or deliberately mistreating patients; the medics were tortured, some to death, to extract confessions. During that period, tens of thousands of Jews were fired from their jobs, and even graduates of prominent educational institutions became unemployable. (My mother, just out of the Moscow Medical Institute No. 2, was among them.)
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Jews make for an easy target, mainly because few will actually care, other than a few disapproving clucks of the tongue.