Long-Overdue Prosecution of Pamyat : A Russian nationalist is convicted of racism and insulting Jews

Last January a small band of thugs from the reactionary Pamyat Society invaded and broke up a meeting of liberal writers--many of whom were Jewish--in Moscow’s Central House of Literature. The mob’s leader, whose anti-Semitic diatribe set off a brawl in the meeting room, was Konstantin Smirnov-Ostashvili.

In Moscow City Court this week, Smirnov-Ostashvili was convicted of inciting racism and sentenced to two years at hard labor. His prosecution and conviction say much about how the Soviet legal system is evolving.

The trial alone marks a watershed. Andrei Makarov, a human rights attorney who served as one of the three public prosecutors in the case, notes that “for first time” anti-Semitic acts have been officially condemned by the state. That reference to the state embraces a historic continuum. Czarist Russia was notorious for its persecution of Jews and its tolerance and instigation of attacks on them. Soviet leaders similarly found it useful to whip up popular anti-Semitism to distract attention from Communism’s failures. Stalin, as part of his mad persecutions and purges, ordered mass deportations of Jews, the crushing of Jewish cultural life and the murders of scores of prominent Jewish intellectuals.

Stalin’s successors backed away from many of the more vicious manifestations of his anti-Semitism, but even decades after his death Soviet Jews continued to be singled out for special treatment and generally made to feel threatened.

That’s why, under more relaxed policies, hundreds of thousands have emigrated or applied to leave, prefering the uncertainties of beginning new lives elsewhere to the insecurities of life in a Soviet Union where right-wing and even avowedly fascist movements may be gaining adherents.

The prosecution and conviction of Smirnov-Ostashvili is another welcome sign of the Soviet Union’s apparent determination to be newly guided by rule of law. There’s no reason to think, though, that the outcome of the case will end or even curb the anti-Semitic scapegoating that is the stock in trade of Pamyat and similar hate groups. Reflecting the paranoid conspiracy notions that underlay the notorious czarist secret police forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Pamyat blames the Soviet Union’s many ills on a “Zionist-Masonic” plot. Ascribing such power to the largely powerless is sheer lunacy. That, however, hasn’t stopped such paranoia from finding ready believers in the past.