Anti-Semitism in Russia: Some Interactions of Paranoia and Masochism in the Ethnic Realm1

Anti-Semitism has been manifested in multifarious ways in Russia for as long as that nation has existed. From the late eighteenth century until the Bolshevik coup in 1917, most of Russia's Jews were restricted to living in a circumscribed area termed the “Pale of Settlement” (“cherta osedlosti evreev”). Many Jews managed to leave the Pale and migrate to other parts of the empire, but they were subjected to periodic expulsions from forbidden areas, and it was not until the fall of the tsarist government that this form of apartheid was fully eliminated. Meantime, Jews were subjected to quotas in admission to various public institutions, they were barred from the civil service and the officer corps, and they were in danger of having their property vandalized or destroyed, and of being beaten and killed in what were called pogroms. In the press they were vilified as economic exploiters of ethnic Russians. All of this was in addition to the ordinary, everyday anti-Semitism of Russian life—insults, ethnic slurs, and occasional physical assaults.

Later, during the Soviet period, everyday anti-Semitism remained alive and well in Russia. Beyond that, the horrendous pogroms of 1918-1921 took a minimum of 50,000 lives (although most of the perpetrators in this case were probably Ukrainian, not Russian). Jews were also victimized by Stalin's anti-Semitic machinations, including the arrest of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as well as the arrest of alleged perpetrators of a “Doctors' Plot” against Soviet leaders. Soviet Jews would have been deported en masse to the east if Stalin had not died in 1953. The campaigns against “cosmopolitanism” and “Zionism” were essentially a government-sanctioned form of anti-Semitism. The reality of the Holocaust—including the fact that Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet citizens aided the German invaders in exterminating Jews—was played down or even falsified by Soviet historians