World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [50]
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As is sadly so often the case with market-dominant minorities, struggling ordinary Russian Jews, with no political connections or billion-dollar fortunes, bear the brunt of Russian anti-Semitism. According to the chairman of the Glasnost Public Foundation in Moscow, a majority of Russians today believe that “they have been impoverished at the expense of rich Jews.”
45 (Along with the oligarchs, many of the Yeltsin government’s key market reformers—including former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, shock therapy advocate Yegor Gaidar, and the now-despised “privatization tsar” Anatoly Chubais—are also well known to be part Jewish.)
46 Russian websites today are filled with references to the “zioncrats” and “bloodsucking Yids” who “hijacked the privatization process,” “control the economy,” and are “stealing the wealth of the Russian people.”
The financial collapse in 1998 brought a burst of popular anti-Semitism, including the bombing of synagogues, the beatings of two rabbis, a number of neo-Nazi marches in Moscow, and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries around the country. Russian National Unity, a paramilitary and virulently anti-Semitic extremist group, is thought to have at least 6,000 active members and up to 50,000 nonactive members, spread across twenty-five Russian regions. One of the group’s leaders was recently sentenced to two years in prison for inciting ethnic hatred. At the trial a Russian Orthodox priest testified that according to the Jewish Talmud, Jews “kill children, gather blood” and “use it to make matzah.”
47 Around the same time, hundreds of posters appeared in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk with the slogan, “Jews are Rubbish!” In the Kuban region of Krasnodar, mailboxes were filled with leaflets saying: “Help save your dear, flourishing Kuban from the damned Jews—Yids! Smash their apartments, set their homes on fire! They have no place on Kuban territory. . . . Anyone hiding the damned Yids will be marked for destruction the same way. The Yids will be destroyed. Victory will be ours!”
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Obviously, Russian anti-Semitism is not caused by economic liberalization or capitalism. As discussed earlier, there was plenty of anti-Semitic sentiment and violence long before 1989, both during the tsarist era and in the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the chaotic, post-perestroika transition to markets has generated starkly concentrated and visible Jewish wealth, bringing to the surface tremendous ethnic resentment and hostility among the “indigenous” Russian majority. According to recent polls, most Russians are deeply “ambivalent” about Jews and thus susceptible to manipulation by politicians, particularly during periods of economic downturn and distress. In one independent survey of 1,509 Muscovites, 52 percent opposed Jewish social-political organizations operating in Russia, while 34 percent favored quotas limiting the number of Jews holding leading positions in Russia. “The basic problem is the economic situation,” Adolf Shayevich, Russia’s chief rabbi, said a few years ago. “People have no work and no prospects. Historically, that’s when Russians look for scapegoats.”
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Even today, with Putin popular and the economy on the upswing, anti-Semitism shows no sign of waning. On February 28, 2002, the Moscow Times reported that a new political party was formed, calling for a better deal for ethnic Russians and explicitly blaming Jews for stealing the country’s wealth. “Look on the list of Russia’s richest people,” urged Vladimir