President Vladimir Putin was the rarest of things: a Russian strongman who was proud to boast of his positive relationship with the Jewish community after centuries of pogroms and antisemitism which blighted both imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.
Putin was, in 2005, the first Russian leader to visit Israel, where he staged an emotional reunion with a former high school teacher. He elevated his Jewish childhood friends Arkady and Boris Rotenberg to the heights of oligarchic power and was careful to rein in allies who used antisemitic tropes.
That reputation was destroyed on the global stage last weekend when riotous antisemitic gangs roamed through Russian cities looking for Jews to attack while the Kremlin—which rarely turns a blind eye to any form of street protest or dissent—remained resolutely silent.
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The unrest began on Saturday when mobs with Palestinian flags raided the hotel Flamingo in the city of Khasavyurt, in the Russian republic of Dagestan, demanding that Jewish people should not be allowed to stay. The hotel’s management went along with the gang and put a sign on the door that read: “The entrance of Jews is strictly forbidden.”
The Kremlin did nothing. The following day, the Jewish Cultural Center in Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria republic in southern Russia, was set on fire amid the rising wave of antisemitism. The attackers left clumsily written graffiti on the wall that read: “Death to Yahuds [an Arabic word for Jews].”
Still, Putin was silent, and the rampaging mob was emboldened. By Sunday night, a crowd of more than 1,500 people had stormed the Makhachkala airport in Dagestan to meet a plane arriving from Tel Aviv.
A local lawmaker in St. Petersburg, Boris Vishnevsky, told The Daily Beast that he was outraged to see Moscow’s impotence. “There are not many words that the Russian language has given the world; the word ‘pogrom’ is one of them. Today the community of about 150,000 Russian Jews cannot feel safe, there is nobody to defend us,” Vishnevsky told The Daily Beast. “The Kremlin is silent… there must be criminal cases opened, there must investigations into this nationalist hate. What is this? Who allows this? Who is responsible?”
Putin’s rhetoric towards the Jewish community has taken a drastic turn in recent months driven perhaps by desperation—with his own power base imperiled—perhaps by his fascination with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s own Jewishness.
The Ukrainian leader is wrecking Putin’s legacy by leading a stirring defense of his nation against the Russian invasion, and his faith has made a mockery of Putin’s claims to be liberating Ukraine from neo-Nazis.
This summer, Putin tried to square the circle by claiming that his old Jewish friends were telling him that Zelensky was a disgrace to the Jewish people. (Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s attempt was even more ludicrous, suggesting Adolf Hitler himself had Jewish blood.)
But Putin now seems to have slipped even further to the dark side while his propagandists push the ludicrous conspiracy theory that the U.S. planted a Jewish president in Ukraine to hide the Nazi grip on power in Ukraine.
When he finally addressed the antisemitic uprising in the Caucasus on Monday, the Russian president delved once again into conspiracy theory, blaming the U.S. for the marauding gangs.
In September, Putin openly mocked the Jewish community himself. Talking about a former confidant who fled to Israel after the foolhardy invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “He is not Anatoly Borisovich Chubais any longer but he is now some Moshe Israelevich.”
“Why is he doing it?” he asked rhetorically, raising the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews are only motivated by money.
The Kremlin’s top ideologues, Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov, have never been shy about their antisemitism. But the anti-Jewish propaganda has reached even greater heights since the Oct. 7 Hamas brutal attack on Israel, with many officials taking the side of the Palestinians and ignoring Israel’s rights.
Putin refused to condemn Hamas for the massacre and welcomed a Hamas delegation to Moscow last week. One prominent Russian Jewish pundit claimed there were many antisemites within the ranks of Russian government officials, who “livened up” after the attack. Before he could be fired from his TV station, Yevgeny Satanovsky said the spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, Maria Zakharova, was “a heavy-drinking skank, who does not like the Jews and can’t stand Israel.”
This was the climate in which radicals believed the events in Dagestan and the Caucasus over the weekend would be tolerated. The minority Jewish community in the region is shaken.
“This is caveman antisemitism. If the attackers found Jews on the plane, they would have torn them into pieces. I was shocked and appalled to see the videos of the Jew hunt,” Georgia-based journalist Misha Dzhinzhikashvili told The Daily Beast. “We crossed paths with Dagestan’s Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan and in Tbilisi, where many Mountain Jews moved in different years and where we have two synagogues. We Jews of the Caucasus always lived a peaceful life, nobody attacked us even in the worst years of the pogroms in Ukraine or Moldova.”
She said today’s threat was higher than ever. “The hate boiled over and showed its face, it is ugly, wild,” Dzhinzhikashvili said.
A Moscow family of Jewish engineers, Alla and Grigory, who asked for their second names not to be used for safety reasons, watched the antisemitic riots with horror. “To us it looks like the beginning of a new Holocaust in Russia, something we would never think we would live long enough to see,” Alla told The Daily Beast. “Just recently I took my little granddaughter to a Jewish kindergarten but today I would be terrified to take her there—it is too dangerous.”
Hate pushed more than 2 million Jews out of the USSR—the post-World War II emigration was one of the largest in history—with families escaping to Israel, Germany. and the United States. Alla and Grigory are living witnesses to several decades of state antisemitism. “Soviet Jews could not go to universities, state institutes did not employ Jews, there were very few professional options for us. Both the state and everyday antisemitism were overwhelming; when I was giving birth to my daughter in a Moscow hospital, a nurse told me that I was fat, because I was Jewish,” Alla told The Daily Beast. “Many of our friends emigrated but we stayed to see a change for the better, to visit the Kremlin with the Russian Jewish Congress.”
By the 1990s, the situation changed dramatically for the better: Jewish businessmen and politicians founded the Russian Jewish Congress and oligarchs donated millions of dollars to synagogues and Jewish centers across the country. Putin personally supported Russian Jews for decades, especially the Chabad-affiliated community who were loyal to him. Russia ranked better than countries like Hungary and Ukraine on the Global index of Antisemitism. In 2019, Putin famously stood on stage outside the Jewish Museum in Moscow between Victor Vekselberg, a Jewish oligarch and donor to local synagogues, and the Russian chief rabbi, Berel Lazar.
Now the concerns about violent antisemitism have returned. “We fear antisemitic pogroms by Tatar and Bashkir Muslims even more than by Muslims of Northern Caucasus, since these republics are much closer to Moscow and they are very rich,” Grigory told The Daily Beast.
Down in the Caucasus, the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, sometimes known as “Putin’s soldier,” has been loudly promoting his support for the Palestinians, even claiming he would send Russian forces to support them.
“We support Palestine. The West and Europe are pulling in forces to destroy Palestine and what are we doing? We’ll define who is right and who is wrong, where are you, Muslims?” Kadyrov wrote on social media. He regularly plays up his faith to demonstrate his authority in front of Russia’s 15-million strong Muslim community.
In Dagestan, locals believe the lack of Muslim leaders contributed to the weekend’s escalation. They believe more reactive officials would have diverted the flight from Tel Aviv once Telegram threats to raid the airport began to circulate. “We Muslims of Dagestan blame our authorities for appointing Russian officials to our republic. They have no sense of reality, they allow a plane from Israel to land here when our people stand with Palestine. The authorities are to blame for this, nobody else,” Magomed Shamilov, a retired police officer and human rights defender, based in Dagestan, told The Daily Beast.
The majority-Muslim republic of Dagestan counts more than 33 ethnic groups including a community of Mountain Jews—Jews of Persian descent—that consists of just a few hundred people living quietly in the 5,000-year-old city of Derbent, near the border with Azerbaijan. Derbent’s Rabbi Ovadyu Isakov was shot in the chest by Islamic militants in 2013.
“Kadyrov openly says that Jews are ‘the biggest enemies of Islam,’” a 27-year-old Muslim resident of Khasavyurt, Idris, told The Daily Beast. “Of course, Kadyrov would never defend the passengers who flew from Israel, when Palestine is bombed and destroyed, he knows that Muslims should not allow this.”
Whether the plane had been diverted to avoid the mob or not, hundreds of Russians had already formed a terrifying threat to Jewish safety.
Sergei Babinets, a defense lawyer whose Team Against Torture provides legal support for victims of human right violations in the Northern Caucasus, said Putin had missed the rising issue in Dagestan because he has become detached, just the way his law enforcement agencies missed the anti-Ukraine war protests in Dagestan last year.
After the authorities eventually scrambled to end the disruption on Sunday night, there were scores of arrests. Babinets said it was in everyone’s interests to ensure the troublemakers were well-treated given the current tensions in the region. “There are over 80 protesters in prison after the attack on the airport, I hope they are not being tortured,” he said. “Because Jews would be blamed for that too—Jews might get blamed even for the bad weather these days.”
