His recent rhetoric targeting Jews suggests that his grip on power may be loosening.
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After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, an underground joke from my Moscow youth declared, the Politburo found three envelopes on the Soviet dictator’s desk. The first, inscribed “Open after my death,” contained a letter telling his successors to place his body next to Lenin’s in the Red Square Mausoleum. “Open when things get bad,” read the second envelope, and the note inside said, “Blame everything on me!” The third envelope, marked “Open when things get really bad,” commanded, “Do as I did!”
Things must be really bad for Russian President Vladimir Putin, because he is resorting to one of Stalin’s preferred ways of holding on to power: appealing to anti-Semitism. Recently, Putin has made a series of remarks dwelling on the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. And in a discussion at an economic forum earlier this month, Putin mocked Anatoly Chubais, a half-Jewish former Kremlin adviser who fled Russia after its invasion of Ukraine last year and is reportedly living in Israel. “He is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais,” Putin said, using his former aide’s first name and patronymic. “He is Moshe Izrayilevich, or some such.”
As a scholar who has been studying Soviet and Russian politics for decades; who discusses that subject regularly with friends, family members, and professional colleagues; and who keeps tabs on what Putin’s critics say about him, I cannot remember him publicly trafficking in anti-Semitism before now. Indeed, his seemingly benevolent attitude toward his Jewish subjects made him unusual among Russian leaders. For more than a century until 1917, Jews in the Russian empire were confined to the Pale of Settlement, mostly in what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania, and were terrorized by periodic pogroms. Early in the 20th century, the czar’s secret police propagated (and are widely suspected of sponsoring) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vicious anti-Semitic forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and has inspired generations of violent anti-Semites.
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Stalin capitalized on that history to consolidate his own control of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1940s, after 20 million Soviet citizens had died in World War II and millions more were starving and homeless, he unleashed a national anti-Semitic campaign, complete with the frenzied unmasking of “rootless cosmopolitans”—whom everyone understood to be Jews—in newspapers. Well-known members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, formed during the war to organize international support for the Soviet military effort, were arrested, tortured, and executed. In what became known as the “Doctors’ Plot,” a predominantly Jewish group of physicians ministering to the Kremlin leadership was accused of poisoning or deliberately mistreating patients; the medics were tortured, some to death, to extract “confessions.” During that period, tens of thousands of Jews were fired from their jobs, and even graduates of prominent educational institutions became unemployable. (My mother, just out of the Moscow Medical Institute No. 2, was among them.)
Putin’s recent rhetoric has been jarring because, despite everything else he has done, he has not tried to whip up public sentiment against Jews. During his 2005 visit to Israel—the first ever to the Jewish state by a Soviet or Russian leader—Putin had an emotional reunion with Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, his high-school German teacher, and bought her an apartment in central Tel Aviv. He made Arkady and Boris Rotenberg—two brothers of Jewish heritage who have been among Putin’s judo sparring partners—into billionaire oligarchs.
Although he spoke at the unveiling of two monuments to Russia’s penultimate czar, Alexander III—a notorious anti-Semite who encouraged pogroms—Putin not only refrained from wielding Judeophobia as a political tool but upbraided those who did. He ordered the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, to retract a statement by an agency aide who had described the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement as a “sect” whose adherents believed in their “supremacy over all nations and peoples.” (The offending official was fired a few months later.) The Russian president apologized in a phone call with then–Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov opined that some Jews were notoriously anti-Semitic. And even as Russian television and social-media outlets have abounded with mad-dog chauvinists and warmongering propagandists since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin appears to have embargoed anti-Semitic themes.
At every turn, Putin seeks to legitimize his war in Ukraine by linking it with Russia’s triumph over the perpetrators of the Holocaust. That Zelensky is Jewish obviously complicates that story. In a discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the moderator Dimitri Simes invited Putin to explain the issue away.
Putin replied that many of his childhood friends are Jewish, and that they all think Zelensky is not a Jew but a disgrace to the Jewish people. He then recounted, from notes, the details of the execution of a Jewish Ukrainian family during World War II, and showed video clips alleging massacres of Jews and ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalists of that era.
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Earlier this month, though, Putin’s allusions to Zelensky’s Jewishness grew sharper. The “Western sponsors” of the Ukrainian government, he told an interviewer, had deliberately chosen a Jewish president of Ukraine to camouflage the “antihuman” essence of the Kyiv regime. It’s “utterly despicable,” Putin concluded, to see a Jew covering up the “glorification of Nazism and those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine.” While still purporting to be ridding Ukraine of Nazis, Putin is zeroing in on a flesh-and-blood culprit: The Russians and the Ukrainians are killing one another because of a Jewish schemer.
Last week, Putin found another target: Chubais, his former special envoy to international organizations, who walked off his job a month after the invasion of Ukraine. After some meandering, Chubais, whose mother is Jewish, landed in Israel (which does not require entry visas for Russian citizens), along with tens of thousands of other Russian immigrants. Initially, his departure caused nary a ripple. Yes, Chubais quit on his own accord, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in March 2022, adding, “As to whether he left Russia or not, that’s his personal business.”
Not anymore. Why did Chubais run off to Israel? Putin mused last week, employing a derisive word, udral, that translates to something like “absconded.” Why is he “hiding” there? And by the way, Putin went on: Although no criminal charges have been brought against Chubais, “a huge financial hole” has been uncovered in the state nanotechnology corporation, Rusnano, which Chubais headed until 2020.
Russians steeped in anti-Semitic tropes could effortlessly read between the lines: A cowardly and probably thieving Jewish bureaucrat had bolted, abandoning the motherland in its hour of tribulation.
Political anti-Semitism—that is, the kind promulgated and encouraged by the authorities—is never just about Jews. It portends rot and insecurity at the top of a government, signifying the need to distract, obfuscate, shift the blame. By twisting Zelensky’s Jewishness into a cause of war and portraying Chubais as a craven deserter, Putin is also revealing the Kremlin’s growing anxiety about its grip on power.
He keeps sinking deeper into the quagmire of a war he cannot win and cannot walk away from. The Wagner mutiny debunked the official myth of national unity in the face of the alleged “Western aggression” against the motherland. To the extent that Putin has a genuine personal aversion to stirring up anti-Semitism, his political needs are now urgent enough for him to overcome it.
In the mosaic of militaristic tyranny that Putin has been assembling, one major tile had been notably missing. He has now begun putting it in place—reviving not only a defining feature of the Stalinist state but also a distinctly ugly part of Russian history.