New crisis, old scapegoat: Putin turns to anti-Semitism

It’s back, but then it never really went away. Sergei Lavrov’s squalid outburst that “Hitler also had Jewish blood” simply brought out into the open, at the highest levels, the anti-Semitism of the Putin regime. When things are going badly – out comes the old card.

During his interview with an Italian TV station, Foreign Minister Lavrov was defending Moscow’s absurd claims that Ukraine is a Nazi state despite its president being Jewish. “So what if Zelensky is Jewish?” he said. “Hitler also had Jewish blood… the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.” Lavrov may know he was talking nonsense, but he also knows that among the audience back home some are enthusiastic about such views, and others are there to be persuaded by the justification for Putin’s war of choice.

Ukrainian and Israeli officials denounced Lavrov. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called his remarks “unforgivable” and said they represented “the lowest form of racism against Jews.” Given the delicate sensitivities of the Russia/Israel relationship, this was strong stuff. The need to keep that relationship on an even keel was probably behind Putin’s apology to Israel’s prime minister Naftali Bennett on Thursday, three days after Lavrov’s remarks. Yet it was notable that no mention of the apology was made in the Kremlin’s read out of the phone call between the two.

Lapid has described Israel’s border with Syria as effectively “a border with Russia” such is the level of Russian military activity there. Upsetting Moscow endangers the cooperation Israel seeks to avoid mistakes being made during Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah and Iranian targets in Syria.

The Russian Foreign Ministry doubled down, publishing an 800-word essay containing isolated examples of cooperation between Nazis and Jewish collaborators during the Holocaust. It went further, claiming that President Zelensky used his Jewish roots as “cover” for his neo-Nazi regime. Another part of the message pushed by the Kremlin is that Jews are using the Holocaust to portray themselves as the only victims when the main victims of the Nazis were Russian and other Eastern European Christians.

The government in Moscow, and its usefully knowing idiots in the West, routinely exaggerate the power of the extreme right in Ukraine. It is true that the Azov Battalion in Mariupol was originally formed from far-right gangs. It’s also true that in 2018 the government was foolish enough to name streets after wartime Nazi collaborators who resisted the Soviets. However, Ukraine is not even close to being a Nazi regime. In the 2019 election the biggest far-right party polled just over 2% of the vote.

Lavrov’s remarks follow weeks of growing anti-Semitism in sections of the Russian media. State TV has hosted guests who blame the war on Jewish influences in Ukraine, Russia, and the West. Obviously Jewish names are brought up with a sly verbal “wink” to suggest the speaker has rumbled the supposed conspiracy to undermine Mother Russia.

Such sentiments are always present in Russian society, although until this year the Putin regime had mostly held them back. Now, with his military floundering in Ukraine, it appears Putin is looking for scapegoats.

The Jews fitted that bill during the centuries preceding the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Russian Orthodox church identified them as “Christ killers” and they were banned from living anywhere in the country other than 15 western provinces which were formerly part of Poland or Lithuania – the Pale. Waves of pogroms hit the Pale with tens of thousands of Jews killed and about two million fleeing to the US and Western Europe.

The anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” emerged from Moscow in the first decade of the 20th century and has poisoned gullible and bigoted minds ever since with the idea that Jewish leaders are seeking world domination. It is still regularly cited in Russia.

After 1917 the communists ended legal discrimination against the Jews, and they began to take their place in Russian society, including in the Communist party. However, prejudice remained, and the myth of a conspiratorial world Jewry continued to be promulgated by the Communists couched in the language of “rootless cosmopolitans”. In 1953 the Kremlin announced the “Doctors’ Plot,” in which Jewish doctors were accused of medically murdering senior Soviet officials.  

Following Stalin’s death there was less official anti-Semitism, but it remained in the bloodstream of the culture. After Communism fell it began to seep out again. The extreme right wing politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Communist party leader Gennadii Ziuganov, both regularly slandered Jews, accusing them of running the country behind the scenes. Attacks on Jews rose, but then fell after Putin took over from Yeltsin.

Putin had a different conspiracy in mind – the West and its dastardly plan to dismember Russia and subjugate its peoples. From about 2003 the idea became a feature of the Kremlin’s message. This continues, indeed is part of the rationale behind the invasion of Ukraine. But it has been joined by an even older canard.

The message now is that Putin is the saviour of Russia, of the Orthodox Church, and even the saviour of western Christianity – Moscow as the Third Rome. A subtext is that behind western liberal democracy is a Jewish conspiracy. Mixed up in all this, albeit at the outer reaches, is the idea that the “Khazar Mafia” is the driver of events. This bizarre belief is that the Jews living in Eastern Europe are descended from the Khazars who, it is said, converted to Judaism in the 8th century.

You won’t hear Lavrov openly spouting such inherent rubbish, but listen closely, and you hear echoes of it. He knows what he’s doing. It never went away.