Anti-Semitic Tide Perilous, Pravda Says : Soviet Union: Party paper warns that rapidly growing prejudice undermines political and economic reforms.

Anti-Semitism is growing rapidly in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda acknowledged Sunday, and it now threatens to undermine the country’s political and economic reforms.

Pravda denounced not only the open anti-Semitism of groups on the far right, such as the nationalistic Pamyat, which blame Jews for all the country’s problems past and present, but also that of Russian nationalists who use anti-Semitism in their efforts to revive Russian culture.

“This unprecedented anti-Semitism is of great concern because we face an attempt to disrupt the process of social consolidation,” Pravda said in an article signed by a Soviet historian, S. Rogov. “A law-based state must protect people of every nationality.”

In one of the strongest official warnings against anti-Semitism, the newspaper said that the country, if it aspires to democracy, cannot quietly content itself with the expectation that the “Jewish question,” a term that itself has an anti-Semitic undertone here, will be solved when the country’s 1.9 million Jews have emigrated.

Pravda, in a break from official assessments in the past, argued that the problem is much broader than acknowledged up to now and that it affects the whole of Soviet society and its efforts at political, economic and social reforms.

Despite repeated warnings over the past year and a half from the Jewish communities in Moscow, Leningrad and other major Jewish centers in the country, Soviet officials have been unwilling to recognize the rapid, even frightening growth in anti-Semitism and its implications for the country.

Even when foreign leaders, including President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, have raised the question, Soviet officials have done little more than to speak of “social tensions” as a result of the country’s severe economic problems.

Pravda, although approaching the issue in terms of the “Jewish question,” Zionism and emigration, went well beyond the previous official position to report, in unambiguously critical terms, the growth of anti-Semitism and the threat it represents.

“A large number of extremist groups have appeared in the country,” the paper said. “Pamyat and the like are openly reviving anti-Semitism as a means of their struggle against perestroika. They use such classic falsifications as the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ which had been fabricated by the Czarist police.

“Again and again, they exploit the myth of the ‘Yid-Mason-Bolshevik conspiracy’ against Russia. Jews are being blamed for killing the Czar’s family and the Stalinist repressions, the forced collectivization, the corruption of the national culture and the destruction of the ecology.

“Unfortunately, political anti-Semitism is being cultivated by a number of literary publications as well. Every issue runs odious speculations. For the first time in our history, anti-Semitism has become quite popular in some intellectual circles.”

Asking why anti-Semitism could not simply be outlawed, Pravda contended that this could also be used as an argument for banning Zionism as “a rejection of a democratic solution for the Jewish question in a multinational state.”

“That is why we cannot ‘ban’ criticism of the Zionist ideology,” the paper said, “and why provocative activities of openly anti-Soviet, pro-fascist movements (such as the Jewish Defense League of Meir Kahane) cannot enjoy immunity either.”

However, Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, the largest of the Soviet republics, said last month that he favors legislation outlawing anti-Semitism and those organizations that promote it.

“We will have to pass a law to put a barrier before those organizations that tend to develop in fascist directions,” Yeltsin said. “That is absolutely inadmissible.”

A major result of the growth of anti-Semitism has been to encourage Soviet Jews to emigrate at an ever-faster pace, the article said, forecasting that Jewish emigration this year will run between 200,000 and 300,000. In the first half of 1990, 50,000 Soviet Jews arrived in Israel, according to reports from Jerusalem, and the projected total for the year is 165,000.

“The number of visa applications is growing,” Pravda said. “One cannot but see that the fear of pogroms is acquiring the scale of a panic. Visa documents are being issued for people who are far from sharing the ideas of political Zionism.

“The problem cannot and should not be solved through mass emigration. The Jewish question should be solved democratically in the Soviet Union. This should not impede natural assimilation or threaten Jewish culture or prevent Jews from going to Israel or any other state. Jewish cultural institutions should, meanwhile, develop freely and democratically to satisfy the natural ethnic requirements of Soviet Jews.”