ANTI-SEMITISM ON RUSSIAN SOIL

One does not have to push the limits of one’s intellectual capacity to realize that “anti-Semitism on Russian soil” is not identical to Russian anti-Semitism. While historically there used to be plenty of the former, this generalization ought not to be transferred to imply the latter. And yet, it is often deliberately transferred.

I must emphasize right away that I am not talking about some Russian Tsar playing ethnic politics and from time to time allowing Ukrainian-led pogroms as a sort of social safety valve at the Jewish expense, but only about the general historical attitude of the Great-Russians toward the Jews ,which simply cannot qualify under any reasonable definition of anti-Semitism as such. The same cannot be said of the citizens of the Western parts of the former Russian Empire, such as the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, the Poles, etc. To accuse the ethnic Great-Russians of an attitude well known to be notoriously exhibited by somebody else, shows a defect of education and understanding on the part of Western students, and an ugly anti-Russian bias on the part of their bigoted professors, especially if Jewish, who should know better. Because every educated and every religious Jew, without exception, knows, for instance, that the classic Jewish tradition holds the names of two world-historically eminent Gentiles as righteous, on the basis of their enormous benefit to the Jews: Napoleon, who gave civil rights first to the Jews of France, then to the Jews of Europe that had been under his control; and Stalin, yes, that selfsame Stalin, who, at least according to the Jews of Russia, Europe, and Israel, saved close to two million Jews from the Holocaust--- first by annexing Eastern Poland in 1939, and then by relocating the Jews deep inside Russia prior to the German invasion of 1941, when, had they stayed behind in the vast areas of Western Russia occupied by the Nazis, most of them would have perished, but, as it turned out in actuality, these Jews, physically saved by Stalin, were to become a vital and abundant component of the post-war Jewish settlement in the newly established State of Israel.

Are Great-Russians capable of exhibiting anti-Jewish tendencies? You bet! Compare them to the Germans, who used to be very sympathetic to the Jews just two centuries ago. Could anybody have imagined, reading Lessing, that less than a century and a half after ‘Nathan der Weise,’ Germany would have a Jewish Foreign Minister (Rathenau), whose assassination in 1922 would be a harbinger of an impending Holocaust? I insist that those bizarre events were not indicative of either an excessive German fondness or an excessive hatred on their part toward the Jews, but rather of their benign tolerance, turning into an incredible ugliness due to a special set of circumstances, having nothing to do with racism. The circumstances included an explicitly prominent role of radical Jewish revolutionaries in Germany’s defeat in WWI (which, in my opinion, was a minor factor) and, far more seriously, the rapid enrichment of the German Jews after the war, set against the backdrop of great impoverishment and misery of the ethnic Germans during the same period of time.

Historically, the Great-Russians were anti-Semitism-free for the most part of their history. Prior to the reign of Tsar Alexander II, they had little contact with the Jews, who were mainly settled on the periphery of the Russian Empire, in Poland and Ukraine. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Alexander II allowed “socially useful” Jews, such as physicians, educators, scientists, and intellectuals, to settle in major Russian cities, and also to spread out into Great-Russian villages. In the course of this encounter, the Russians could only have a favorable impression of the cultured professional Jews in their midst. And then of course how can you hate your doctor or the teacher of your kids?

During the Soviet period, especially in the beginning, the mentality of the totalitarian state did not make an explicit distinction between different races, ethnicities, and cultures, as long as their representatives showed their unquestioning loyalty to their common Soviet State. It does not mean that all those differences became non-existent, but they drastically shrunk in importance, lurking somewhere in the background, very seldom coming to the fore. This goes of course for all constituent cultures of the Soviet Union, even those afflicted with the highest level of prejudice against others. (Such as the Azeris against the Armenians, for instance.)

And yet, it will be untrue to deny that a certain Great-Russian mistrust of the Jews had existed at all times. But it was never manifested as anti-Semitism per se. It was a product of Russia’s historical Xenophobia and her anti-Capitalist slant. There was never a prejudice on their part toward the assimilated Russian Jews, who had accepted conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity, the overwhelmingly essential litmus test for any foreigner’s acceptance as “one of us,” that is, as a Russian par excellence.

The first time a specific anti-Jewish bias showed itself among the Great-Russians was in the 1970’s, when Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate to Israel, but started emigrating in large numbers to the United States of America. Many non-Jewish Russians then began looking upon the Jews as the fifth column of the Soviet society, ready to join Russia’s Main Adversary, ergo utterly untrustworthy. There was also a resentment on account of the special privileges given to the Jews by the Soviet Government: Why am I not allowed what they are allowed? Not that I want to go abroad, but as a matter of principle! To be honest, these particular aspects of the Jewish emigration had a very negative effect on the attitude toward the Jews in the USSR.

A slightly different, albeit connected, Xenophobic and anti-Jewish bias developed in post-Soviet Russia as a result of an aggressive effort on the part of foreigners led by the United States, to “capitalize” Russia, and turn her into a colony in the American Global Empire. Furthermore, the Russians perceived a conspiracy of sorts between the American imperialists and Russia’s Jewish billionaire capitalists, known as the oligarchs, such as Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, and others, which perception nurtured an anti-capitalist and anti-Jewish bias.

Once we were talking about non-Russian anti-Semitism on Russian soil, Ukrainians were particularly noted for it. The Ukrainian rebellion against Poland in the mid-seventeenth century, led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky, targeted Jews who had served as tax collectors for the Poles, leading to the massacre of half a million Jews, referred to as the Khmelnitsky Holocaust. Nevertheless, Ukraine under the Russian Empire was settled by at least a million of shtetl Jews, and the Ukrainian propensity for anti-Jewish violence was barely contained by the Tsarist government to avoid a massive extermination of the Jews, led by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. At the time of World War II, one of them, Stepan Bandera, personally participated in the slaughter of 110,000 Ukrainian Jews, which number is obviously part of the WWII Holocaust statistics. Ironically, Bandera was a foremost national hero, alongside Bogdan Khmelnitsky, in Victor Yushchenko’s Orange Ukraine, and the latter’s American sponsors and admirers never had objections to these two Holocaust perpetrators’ portraits being paraded across Kiev, Lvov, and all other major cities and villages of Orange Ukraine. Nor were there any official objections from Washington when Stepan Bandera was declared Ukraine’s national hero, and numerous monuments to him were erected around the country against the express wishes of the majority of the Ukrainian population.

In order to ascribe anti-Semitic hatreds to any nation or ethnic group, one has to study their behavior during WWII. It will then become explicitly clear who was exterminating the Jews with a vengeance, and who was actually saving them from the slaughter by others. It was Stalin’s Russia, not the Ukrainians, not the Poles, not the Balts, but the Great Russians, who saved nearly two million Jews from the Holocaust, which fact has been deliberately downplayed, ignored, swept under the rug by the American anti-Russian propaganda. The majority of Washington’s ‘agitpropers’ happen to be Jewish, which is already inexcusable, seeing how some American Jews are thus denying, falsifying and debasing the four-thousand year history of the Jewish people.