Anti-Semitism was a major feature of both late Tsarist and Stalinist as well as neo-Stalinist Russian politics. What does this legacy entail for the emergence of post-Soviet politics? What are the sources, ideologies, permutations, and expressions of anti-Semitism in recent Russian political life? Who are the main protagonists and what is their impact on society?This book shows that anti-Semitism is alive and well in contemporary Russia, in general, and in her political life, in particular. The study focuses on anti-Semitism in political groups, mass media and religious organizations from the break-up of the Soviet Union until shortly before the elections to the fourth post-Soviet State Duma which saw the entry of a major new nationalist grouping, Rodina (Motherland), into the Russian parliament. The author analyzes various “justifications” for anti-Semitism, its manifestations and its ups and downs during this period. The book chronicles Russian federal and regional elections, which served as a “reality check” for the ultra-nationalists. Several sections are devoted to the role of anti-Semitism in political associations, including marginal neo-Nazi groups, “mainstream” nationalist parties, and the successor organizations of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A special section covers the financial sources for post-Soviet anti-Semitic publications. The author considers anti-Semitism within a wider context of religious and ethnic intolerance in Russian society. Likhachev, as a result, compiles a “Who is Who” of Russian political anti-Semitism. His book will serve as a reliable compendium and obligatory starting point for future research on post-Soviet xenophobia and ultra-nationalist politics.

The first book-length analysis of how the Bolsheviks responded to antisemitism during the Russian Revolution.

The author discusses the level, nature and characteristics of antisemitism currently extant in the former Soviet Union -- specifically Russia and Ukraine, the only post-Soviet states with substantial Jewish populations. The author reviews phenomena including acts of violence committed against Jews (and perceived Jews), violence against other ethnic groups, government antisemitism, fascism, radical political parties, Church antisemitism, and the fragility of Jewish institutions.

Antisemitism has had a long and complex history in Russian intellectual life and has revived in the post-Communist era. In their concept of the identity of the Jewish people, many academics and other thinkers in Russia continue to cast Jews in a negative or ambivalent role. An inherent rivalry exists between "Russia" and "the Jews" because Russians have often viewed themselves-whether through the lens of atheistic communism or that of the most conservative elements of the Orthodox Church-as a chosen people whose destiny is to lead the way to world salvation. In this book, Vadim Rossman presents the foundations and present influence of intellectual antisemitism in Russia. He examines the antisemitic roots of some major trends in Russian intellectual thought that emerged in earlier decades of the twentieth century and are still significant in the post-Communist era: neo-Eurasianism, Eurasian historiography, National Bolshevism, neo-Slavophilism, National Orthodoxy, and various forms of racism. Such extreme right-wing ideology continues to appeal to a certain segment of the Russian population and seems unlikely to disappear soon. Rossman confronts and challenges a range of disturbing, sometimes contradictory, but often quite sophisticated antisemitic ideas posed by Russian sociologists, historians, philosophers, theologians, political analysts, anthropologists, and literary critics.

Since the end of the USSR, post-Soviet Jewry has evolved into an ethnically and culturally diverse Russian speaking community. This process is taking place against the gradual inflation of a collective identity among Russian-speaking Jews that survived the first post-Soviet decade. The infrastructure for this new entity is provided by new local (or ethno-civic) groups of East European Ashkenazi Jewry with specific communal, subcultural, and ethno-political identities (“Ukrainian,” “Moldavian,” or “Russian” Jews, e.g.). These communities demonstrate a changing balance of identification between their countries of residence and the “transnational Russian-Jewish community”, and they absorb a significant number of persons of non-Jewish and ethnically heterogeneous origins as well. This book discusses identity, community modes, migration dynamics, socioeconomic status, attitudes toward Israel, social and political environments, and other parameters framing these trends using the results of a comprehensive sociological study of the extended Jewish population conducted in 2019–2020 by this author in the five former-Soviet Union countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Kazakhstan).

Sifting through thousands of recently declassified documents in the formerly secret archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the KGB, Gennadi Kostyrchenko uncovers irrefutable evidence of Stalin's intentionally anti-Semitic policy. The documents describe the suppression of all free manifestations of Jewish life, forced assimilation, and the purging of Jews from most official positions.

This is a comprehensive and topical history of the Jews in the Soviet Union and is based on firsthand documentary evidence and the application of a pioneering research method into the fate of national minorities. Within a four-part chronological framework, Professor Pinkus examines not only the legal-political status of the Jews, and their reciprocal relationship with the Soviet majority, but also the impact of internal economic, demographic and social processes upon the religious, educational and cultural life of Soviet Jewry. A second layer of analysis describes in depth the complex linkages between the Jews of the Soviet Union, the Jews in other diasporas and the state of Israel itself. The Jews of the Soviet Union marks a major contribution to the historiography and social analysis of its subject and provides a worthy companion to Professor Pinkus's acclaimed documentary study The Soviet Union and the Jews 1948-1967.