On June 17, 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived by boat to watch three flags being raised over the Gulf of Finland: those of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation. Gazprom had erected three flagpoles, each nearly 180 meters tall. The empire overthrown by the Bolsheviks and the state they subsequently built coexist comfortably in Putin’s Russia. They even stand at the same height.
In Rostov-on-Don, acknowledging that Jews were murdered at a major Holocaust massacre site proved more difficult. In 2011, municipal authorities replaced the inscription at the memorial in Zmiyovskaya Balka, the site of mass executions. The words “Jews” and “Holocaust” disappeared. What remained was a reference to “Soviet civilians and prisoners of war.”
After two years of disputes and protests by Jewish organizations, the plaque was replaced again. The reference to Jews was restored. The word “Holocaust” was not.
In contemporary Russia, Soviet anti-Zionism coexists with Orthodox monarchist mythology. The state officially commemorates the Holocaust, while its history also serves as ammunition in political disputes.
Antisemitism in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union
In the Russian Empire, Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement – the territory where most Jews were legally required to reside – accused of ritual murder, and killed in pogroms. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” also gained widespread circulation there.
The blood libel – the false allegation that Jews used Christian blood in religious rituals – was a widespread superstition. Such accusations predated modern nationalism, survived the Enlightenment, and persisted in the Russian Empire even after official authorities had rejected them.
By the late 19th century, religious hostility was increasingly intertwined with racial antisemitism. Jews were portrayed not merely as members of another faith but as an alien element within the nation. Even conversion to Christianity did not necessarily dispel suspicion.
Sociologist Klaus Holz describes one feature of national antisemitism through the figure of the Jew as a “third party.” In a world divided into nations, Jews were imagined as capable of operating across national boundaries, infiltrating other societies, and controlling them from within. They were portrayed not simply as another people but as a supposed threat to the national order itself.
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” gave these ideas the form of a worldwide conspiracy. Revolutions, capitalism, liberalism, and political crises were supposedly the work of a single force. Jews could be depicted simultaneously as revolutionaries destroying the state and capitalists controlling it.
The Bolsheviks abolished the tsarist restrictions and declared antisemitism unacceptable. Under Stalin, however, the authorities launched a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” a designation used to target Jewish intellectuals; executed the leadership of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a wartime Soviet organization that had mobilized international support against Nazi Germany; and orchestrated the Doctors’ Plot, a fabricated conspiracy case targeting predominantly Jewish physicians.
Mass anti-Jewish repression ended after Stalin’s death. Soviet propaganda nevertheless continued to portray international Zionism as a hostile force linked to Western intelligence agencies. Discrimination persisted in admissions to universities and research institutions and in appointments to senior positions. Some Jews 'Russified' their names.
Historian and antisemitism researcher Thomas Haury has examined this mechanism in Stalinist and left-wing anti-Zionism. Although the official ideology proclaimed internationalism and condemned ethnic discrimination, Soviet propaganda reinterpreted old notions of a Jewish conspiracy in the context of the struggle against imperialism. The ethnic character of the persecution went unacknowledged.
In official Soviet remembrance, Jews murdered during the Holocaust became “Soviet civilians.” The Nazis murdered them precisely because they were Jews, regardless of citizenship, language, or degree of assimilation. Soviet commemorative policy placed their fate within the broader history of wartime losses, without recognizing the Holocaust as a distinct catastrophe.
After 1991, Jewish communities gained freedom of religious and cultural life. The Holocaust Research and Education Center was established in 1992. Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in 2012.
Historians, museums, and Jewish organizations worked to restore the memory of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the state incorporated Soviet and imperial symbols into its own historical narrative. It supported some Jewish cultural initiatives, but the revival of the imperial past also brought old monarchist legends back into public debate.
In November 2017, Russian Orthodox Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov said that a substantial part of a church commission believed the murder of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family had been ritualistic. “We take the theory of ritual murder very seriously,” he said. Investigative Committee representative Marina Molodtsova announced plans to examine the theory.
The Bolsheviks executed the imperial family in 1918. The execution was led by Yakov Yurovsky, whose background has long featured in antisemitic interpretations of the Romanovs’ murder.
Alexander Boroda, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, recalled that accusations of ritual murder against Jews had led to persecution and pogroms for centuries. Tikhon rejected allegations of antisemitism. He said he was referring to ritual revenge carried out by atheist Bolsheviks.
The theory that the Romanovs were ritually murdered had already spread a century ago among sections of the White émigré monarchist community.
Unlike Soviet anti-Zionism, this narrative draws on religious anti-Judaism and the blood libel. RIAS, a German network that documents and analyzes antisemitic incidents, distinguishes between religious, modern conspiratorial, post-Holocaust, and Israel-related forms of antisemitism. In its methodology, these forms are not mutually exclusive.
Antisemitism on Russian television: Who was to blame for the Holocaust?
On March 22, 2014, Russian nationalist writer Alexander Prokhanov appeared on the state television channel Russia 24 to discuss Jewish organizations that had supported Ukraine’s Maidan protests.
He warned that they were bringing a second Holocaust upon themselves. Presenter Evelina Zakamskaya replied: “They were bringing the first one closer in the same way.”
Zakamskaya’s remark reproduced an antisemitic motif of blaming victims for their own destruction. German-language scholarship describes such an inversion as Täter-Opfer-Umkehr (victim-perpetrator reversal).
In May 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, responding to a question about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish background, claimed that Hitler had Jewish ancestry and that some of the most fervent antisemites were themselves Jewish.
His remarks triggered a diplomatic scandal with Israel. The office of then-prime minister Naftali Bennett later said Putin had apologized for the foreign minister’s statement.
At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 16, 2023, Putin said: “I have many Jewish friends, going back to childhood. They say Zelensky is not a Jew, he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.”
In a September 2023 interview with Russia 24, Putin had already described Zelensky as an “ethnic Jew” who, he claimed, was covering up the glorification of Nazism.
On September 12, 2023, at the Eastern Economic Forum, Putin spoke about Anatoly Chubais, the former senior Russian official who had moved to Israel. Putin referred to him as “some kind of Moshe Izrailevich” and suggested that Chubais feared possible criminal proceedings over financial problems at Rusnano, the state-backed nanotechnology company he had headed.
Suspicions of dual loyalty followed Jews long before the establishment of Israel. In the 19th century, antisemites questioned whether Jews could be full members of a nation-state. After Israel’s establishment, Soviet propaganda portrayed Jewish ties to the country as potential evidence of political disloyalty.
By assigning Chubais a Jewish name, Putin made his departure for Israel appear to reveal a previously concealed identity. Antisemitism researchers describe this kind of symbolic exclusion from the community of “us” through the concept of othering.
Antisemitism in Russia’s Security Council and the Lubavitch Hasidim
In October 2022, Alexei Pavlov, an aide to the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, published an article in the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty about what he called Ukraine’s “witches’ cauldron.”
Among the religious movements he described as dangerous were the Lubavitch Hasidim, followers of Chabad. Pavlov claimed that the movement’s central principle was “superiority over all nations and peoples.” Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar belongs to the movement.
Lazar publicly objected, calling the claims “vulgar antisemitic nonsense.” Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev apologized and said the matter had been addressed with the author. According to Patrushev, Pavlov’s position “in no way represents the official position of the Security Council of the Russian Federation.” Pavlov was dismissed in January 2023.
Antisemitism in Russia: Public attitudes and the North Caucasus
A survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2022 and published in 2023 found that 26% of Russian respondents endorsed at least six of 11 antisemitic stereotypes.
Thirty-six percent agreed that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they lived. Seventeen percent denied the Holocaust or believed that the number of Jews murdered had been greatly exaggerated.
One of the statements the ADL uses to measure antisemitic attitudes is that Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. In the Russian sample, 42% of respondents agreed.
Another survey, commissioned by the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress in 2018, found that beliefs about excessive Jewish influence over the economy, politics, and the media were widespread.
Researchers at the SOVA Center, a Russian organization that monitors xenophobia, hate crimes, and extremist activity, have noted that serious antisemitic attacks in Russia remained relatively rare.
However, after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the outbreak of war in Gaza, a series of antisemitic incidents occurred in the North Caucasus.
On October 28, 2023, a crowd gathered outside the Flamingo Hotel in Khasavyurt, Dagestan, after a rumor spread on social media that refugees from Israel were staying there. People threw stones at the windows and demanded that the guests be checked. Police allowed representatives of the crowd inside. A notice subsequently appeared at the entrance barring Israeli citizens, identified in parentheses as Jews.
That same day, demonstrators in Cherkessk, Karachay-Cherkessia, demanded that Israeli refugees be kept out and Jews expelled from the region. The following day, a Jewish cultural center under construction in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, was set on fire, and an antisemitic inscription appeared on its wall.
On October 29, a mob stormed the runway at Makhachkala airport, searching for passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv. People inspected cars, demanded identification documents, and hunted for Jews.
One participant in the riot even peered into an aircraft engine.
Four days later, Dagestan’s leader, Sergei Melikov, commented on the footage: “When I first saw it, I smiled too. But then I became frightened. He’s looking inside to see whether there’s a Jew in there or not.”
Putin claimed that the unrest had been instigated in part from Ukrainian territory by Western intelligence agencies. He presented no evidence for the allegation.
Research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an organization studying extremism and online disinformation, found that antisemitic rumors and calls to action had spread through local social media accounts and Telegram channels.
Following the riots, Israel’s National Security Council raised its travel warning for the North Caucasus to Level 4, its highest threat category, and urged Israelis in the affected areas to leave. Three years later, the region remains at Level 4, while the rest of Russia is listed at Level 2.
Holocaust remembrance in Russia: Schools and Yad Vashem
January 27, 2025, marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. That day, the subject of Conversations About Important Things – Russia’s nationwide, state-designed series of weekly school lessons on patriotic themes – was the “Year of the Defender of the Fatherland.” The lesson focused on military service and patriotism.
In its international statements, the Kremlin emphasized the importance of the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camp. Meanwhile, in Russian schools, the main theme of the day was the government’s political agenda, focused on the sanctity of the war waged against Ukraine.
In February 2024, Russian television presenter and prominent pro-Kremlin commentator Vladimir Solovyov circulated a claim that Israel’s Yad Vashem had removed material about the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the murder of Jews. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova endorsed the allegation.
Yad Vashem said no such removal took place. Historian Aron Shneer pointed to material about Ukrainian collaborators that remained on display at the museum.
The Russian state’s approach to the Holocaust differs from that of its close partner, Iran, whose former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a “myth” and whose government hosted a Holocaust-denial conference. Russia officially recognizes the Holocaust, but its history is repeatedly used to level accusations against political opponents. Its officials have also emphasized the Jewish identity of Holocaust victims only when it serves their interests.
Follow us on GoogleSource: The Jerusalem Post · NINA POGREBNAYA
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