Economic Ills Give Rise to Anti-Semitism in Russia

In the midst of economic collapse, Russia has at least one growth industry: hatred.

In recent weeks, following time-dishonored tradition, some Russians have been loudly and crudely blaming the country’s woes on Jews.

The new wave of anti-Semitism is not just gutter talk. Diatribes laced with ethnic slurs have echoed repeatedly in Russia’s highest forums--on national television, in front of the Kremlin and in parliament. Some political leaders have shown support, or at least stood silent, while their compatriots have spewed vitriol.

It’s ugly, but no one is yet sure whether it’s dangerous.

“There could easily be isolated incidents of violence,” said Alexander Motyl, who studies Russian ethnic issues at Columbia University. “But I’m doubtful this could lead to sustained outbreaks, at least for some time.”

Anti-Semitism is as perennial in Russia as the snow. It tends to arrive in force during seasons of economic discontent, and it lurks beneath the surface the rest of the time as stubbornly as permafrost.

Nonetheless, the current storm is unusual in both strength and breadth.

It began in early October when a prominent and notoriously acid-tongued general, Albert M. Makashov, disgorged a stream of abuse during a public rally outside the Kremlin. His remarks were largely incoherent except for the use of a Russian epithet for Jews and the general suggestion that they should be identified and punished.

Makashov is a Communist deputy in the Duma, parliament’s lower house. Liberal lawmakers drafted a mild motion denouncing the general’s remarks as “cause for concern.” However, when it came up for a vote, Communist lawmakers abstained and the motion failed.

The controversy has since intensified, with much of the discussion focusing on whether the Communists, and party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov in particular, are promoting anti-Semitism.

There’s a historical irony to that debate. The Communist Party espouses eternal loyalty to the teachings of founder V.I. Lenin, who at times wrote eloquently against anti-Semitism and Russian nationalism. Yet, especially since the Soviet collapse, the party has found itself ideologically adrift. As a result, Russian nationalism and its anti-Semitic corollary have become a kind of default ideology.

“The entire leadership of the party turned out to support not the Communist Makashov, but the anti-Semite Makashov,” wrote Vitaly Tretyakov, editor of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper. “Now it is almost futile to try and prove that Russian communism and Russian anti-Semitism are not one and the same thing.”

Even the Kremlin has been drawn into the fray, demanding a firmer response from law enforcement against “extremism.” Federal prosecutors complied, opening an investigation into whether Makashov’s remarks were an illegal incitement to violence.

“When the situation in the country becomes difficult, many feel an urge to look for enemies and culprits. You know which ethnic groups are being mentioned in this case,” said Dmitri Yakushkin, spokesman for President Boris N. Yeltsin.

The country’s three main television networks have devoted considerable air time to the debate, much of it highly critical of Makashov and Zyuganov.

The ORT network featured a mock-serious segment in which pedestrians were shown Makashov’s picture and asked to identify his ethnicity. About half said he looked Jewish. The network then offered advice on how to measure facial features to ascertain racial purity and “ensure admission to the glorious future.”

Still, such heavy-handed ridicule does little to attack the roots of the problem, which are old and deep.

Czarist Russia herded Jews into the region called the “Pale of Settlement,” and it gave the world the word “pogrom.”

In Soviet times, Jews were excluded from some universities and professions and targeted by thinly veiled campaigns, such as attacks on “cosmopolitanism.”

In the free-for-all post-Soviet period, racists and neo-Nazis have discovered new freedom to promote their ideas, and skinhead attacks against nonwhites are reported to be on the rise.

It doesn’t help the forces of tolerance that several Jewish businesspeople and officials have played prominent roles in the economy’s rise and recent fall.

At least half of the powerful “oligarchs” who control a significant percentage of the economy are Jewish. The reviled architect of Yeltsin’s failed reform policies, Anatoly B. Chubais, is rumored to be Jewish, along with Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, ousted Deputy Prime Minister Boris Y. Nemtsov, and Yeltsin’s wife, Naina.

Finally, even the Russian language has a conceptual difficulty with Jewishness. Although English has separate ideas of nationality and ethnicity, the two are combined in the Russian term natsionalnost. In common parlance, one can be either Russian or Jewish, but not both.

It is hard to tell where the current upsurge will lead.

There has been a backlash, particularly from the television networks. The influential tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets printed a long article comparing side-by-side quotes from Zyuganov and Adolf Hitler.

In the wake of such criticism, the Duma on Nov. 13 held a second vote and adopted a statement presumably denouncing ethnic hatred. But the language was so vague that it could be read equally as criticism of the media.

It denounced “individual deputies, officials and media outlets” for “not contributing to the maintenance of friendly relations and mutual respect among various ethnic groups.”

For the time being, said Alan Rousso, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, the debate is generating a “permissive atmosphere” that could lead to some incidents of violence.

However, the Communists remain an opposition party without the levers of state control and riven by internal disputes. And so far none of the strong nationalists--primarily former Gen. Alexander I. Lebed and Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov--are jumping on the anti-Semitic bandwagon.

“I don’t think there’s a Hitler in Russia right now,” Rousso said.

To the contrary, Luzhkov--whose political star is on the rise--is known to have good relations with Jewish leaders. He has denounced Makashov for “savagery and neanderthalism that threatens to destroy the only thing that keeps us together in the Russian Federation--our multinational ties.”

In fact, some analysts believe there is a possibility that the anti-Semitism debate might break open a rift in the Communist Party between social moderates and the nationalist hard line.

At a minimum, it has already forced the defection of some prominent Communist allies. And it seems to have cooled Luzhkov’s interest in an alliance, which some had seen as a way to unify the party around a centrist platform.

In the final analysis, Communists taking aim at Jews might wind up undermining their own party instead. Even Lenin, in his own way, seems to have foreseen the possibility.

“Scratch some Communists,” he wrote disparagingly in 1919, “and you will find Russian chauvinists.”