N. E. RUDENSKY
N. E. RUDENSKY GUEST COLUMNIST Today, political antisemitism is almost exclusively a Russian phenomenon. Non-Russian republics, even the Ukraine, now tend to encourage Jewish cultural activities...
...Here the Jews (and Zionists and Freemasons) are perceived as agents of a world conspiracy against the Russian nation...
...Current Soviet antisemitism should not be identified, as is often done, with the notorious Pamyat (Memory) and other national-patriotic movements...
...During the Soviet period, the national identity of the Russian people, for all its visible political predominance, suffered no less than that of other nations...
...This balance cannot last long...
...That may have been indicated by the crushing defeat that Pamyat and similar groups suffered in the elections to the Russian parliament last year...
...it has become much more open...
...Most national-political movements in non-Russian republics, even in the Ukraine, which has a long history of Wsemitism, now tend to encourage ewish cultural activities and to oppose ntisemitism...
...Moreover, all of the Soviet nations now passionately seek to restore their own cultures and identities...
...As has often happened in history, once again the Jews are at hand as the principal culprits...
...Second, there has been a striking rise of unofficial antisemitism...
...Today, however, we see a peculiar balance...
...Non-Russian republics, even the Ukraine, now tend to encourage Jewish cultural activities and to oppose antisemitism...
...A magazine like Molodaya Gvardiya now approvingly quotes both from Lenin's attack on Jewish "bourgeois nationalism" and from Henry Ford's expose of Jews as leaders of the international Communist movement...
...Just a few years ago the first trend was far more important than the second, notwithstanding a degree of convergence between them...
...Yet its sources and implications seem to involve something vital for Soviet political life as a whole...
...As Communist ideology disintegrates the second type of antisemitism (which is more virulent and violent) will become increasingly influential...
...The second antisemitic current stems om blut und boden (blood and soil)— ^pe Russian nationalism, which stresses ftch values as Russian national statehood and Russian Orthodoxy...
...Indeed, outside Russia, (rojewish attitudes are widely perceived is an additional manifestation of the ^riving for independence from Russia fith its antisemitism...
...The process of Russian national cultural regeneration is bound to be particularly painful since the Russians, unlike, say, the Georgians or the Lithuanians, cannot claim that the Communist regime was forced on them by a foreign power...
...But today antisemitic propaganda in the Soviet Union no longer needs the time-honored cloak of anti-Zionism...
...Antisemitism is hardly the most important current political problem in the U.S.S.R...
...However, if socio-economic conditions deteriorate still further, as seems likely, and the authorities continue to respond ineffectively to antisemitic activities (formally punishable by Soviet law), the situation might become dangerous indeed, 'fi> N. E. Rudensky lives in Moscow where he is a research fellow specializing in ethnic problems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences...
...Even today, we still hope that antisemitism does not have extensive mass support...
...The first is jntisemitism based on appropriately djusted Marxist-Leninist ideology that Jerceives Zionism, the State of Israel |nd ultimately the Jewish nation as gents of world imperialism, seeking to jestroy the socialist Soviet state, tntisemitic propaganda of this kind was isseminated in terms of "class ap-roach" and it was often disguised as inti-Zionism...
...Antisemitism in the age of perestroika is characterized by two contradictory tendencies: First, there has been a decline of official, state-sponsored antisemitism that has been inherent in Soviet society at least since World War II...
...There is also some influential literary antisemitism— in periodicals like Nash Sovremennih (Our Contemporary) and Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guards, the official publication of Komsomol, the Communist Party Youth Organization...
...j Russian antisemitism reflects two ba-jc trends, originally different and seem-figly irreconcilable...
...On the one hand, we see growing opportunities to promote Jewish culture and Jewish studies, almost no restrictions on emigrating to Israel and improving relations between the Soviet Union and Israel...
...Antisemitism still persists within the state and party apparatus...
...He is the author of more than 30 published works on ethnography, demography and nationality problems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...On the other hand, antisemitic activities—as yet, mosdy confined to propaganda—are increasingly massive and outspoken...
...Now that the totalitarian Communist system no longer exists, Soviet society is asking where responsibility lies for the inhumanities of the past seven decades...
Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4
