Antisemitism in Russia

This chapter provides an overview of antisemitism in modern Russia, not necessarily chronological, but a short survey of the different ways by which antisemitism appeared over the course of the twentieth century. Zvi Gitelman has famously characterized twentieth-century Jewish-Russian relations as a “century of ambivalence” during which periods of friendly co-existence were disrupted by violent conflict. The chaotic years following the state failure and collapse of the Russian Empire in the final years of World War I and the subsequent anarchy and civil war were accompanied by a third wave of anti-Jewish violence. In scope and brutality vastly eclipsing the previous two waves of pogroms, again the south-western borderlands were the epicentre of the violence. Soviet authorities condemned antisemitism, but also traditional Jewish life. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states in 1939–1940 was accompanied by waves of terror which upset the delicate balance between the ethnic groups and sharply radicalized antisemitic attitudes.