#10 | June 19 - July 2, 1997  

Around the turn of the century an unusually ugly document began to be circulated all across Russia. Called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or Zioniskiye Protokoli in Russian, it was presented as a secret plan by an international consortium of Jewish bankers to take over the world economy and enslave Christian Russia.

Actually a forgery written by Tsarist secret police, the Protocols fit in with the spirit of the times, in which pogroms were common and racist groups like the Black Hundreds were taken seriously when they circulated stories of Rabbis abducting Russian children and serving their flesh at religious ceremonies.

With the Tsar's grasp on Russia growing weaker every day, his political machine became more and more dependent on race-baiting propaganda to deflect criticism from the monarchy-and the Protocols were a pillar of the new strategy.

The authors of the Protocols died in ideological agony, with Christian Russia swept away in revolution as a leather-clad Jew on a horse, Leon Trotsky, galloped along the front lines driving on a godless new Russian army to victory after victory in the name of another Jew, Karl Marx.

Probably the Protocol authors' only consolation in death was the knowledge that, after all, their infamous work of racial invective was an absurd fiction; like Stalin and the other chauvinists who later restored anti-Semitism to Russia, they must have felt sure that their Jewish banking "conspiracy" would never take place in Russia.

Little did they know that, nearly a century after the Protocols were written, Russian anti-Semites would perversely will into being their own worst nightmare-a banking oligarchy made up almost exclusively of Jews, holding all the levers of power in a new post-revolutionary Russia.

The few prominent Jews who are willing to discuss the matter generally agree that Jews have risen to the top in the new Russia precisely because communist anti-Semitism for so long prevented them from advancing their careers within the Soviet system. Jews had such a difficult time getting ahead in the Soviet Union that they eventually came to be known as "Invalids of the 5th group," a reference to the number 5, which signified Judaism in the nationality column in Soviet passports.

The only options left to Jews for gaining power and influence were "prohibited" activities-primarily commerce and banking. And once the Soviet Union collapsed, Jews were ready to step in to take charge of these long-ignored and suddenly crucial economic and political structures.

"In the Soviet Union, Jews were forced to be shopkeepers and tradesmen, and operate in a shadow economy," said analyst Andrei Piontkowsky. "That economy later became the basis for the new political and economic infrastructure in modern Russia."

Within six years after the end of communism, nearly all the key positions in government and commerce in Russia were occupied by Jews or people of Jewish origin.

Who are they? In government they are, first and foremost, Deputy Prime Ministers Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais, who, while declining to discuss their nationality openly, are widely held to be half-Jewish. Yeltsin economics advisor Aleksandr Livshits and Economics Minister Yakov Yurensen are both Jews, as is Alfred Koch, the head of the powerful State Property Committee.

On the security side there is Boris Berezovsky, head of LogoVAZ, primary shareholder in ORT television and Deputy Secretary of the Security Council. In the Duma, leading democrat and Yabloko chief Grigory Yavlinsky is half-Jewish, and even vicious and apparently self-hating nationalist and anti-semite. Vladimir Zhirinovsky is famous for claiming to have a Russian mother and "lawyer" for a father.

Read the news this past week? Well, in the wake of the Primorsky Krai gubernatorial crisis, you might have noticed that President Yeltsin named one Boris Mintz to be head of a new Directorate for Local Self-Government, a position that may soon become very influential if the trend toward the declawing of local governors in favor of Federal control continues. Those not convinced yet that Jews are prevalent in government can add Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov and former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar to the list; both are rumored to be half-Jewish.

Outside of government, nearly all of Russia's biggest banks, which constitute the core of Russia's new oligarchical political power base, are headed by Jews. Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Khait of Most-Bank and Pyotr Avin and Mikhail Friedman of Alpha-Bank are all Jews, while Mikhail Khordakovsky of Bank Menatep is widely believed to be Jewish. Political power, corporate power, banking power, media power-all, at least on the face of it, is concentrated in the hands of Jews in modern Russia.

The list is so dauntingly long that it has become a touchy subject for Jewish leaders in Russia and around the world, who fear that, should things get much worse in Russia, it may set off a widespread anti-Semitic reaction.

The American B'nai B'rith magazine has even commissioned an article on the ascendancy of Jews in Russia and its possible social ramifications. The New York Times ran a similar article not long ago, speculating that "success might mean failure" for Russia's new Jewish elite. Prominent Russian Jews agree that the situation is fraught with potential trouble.

"Of course it's dangerous," said Alexander Minkin of Novaya Gazeta, probably Russia's best-known and most vilified print journalist. "Even in the Soviet Union, when there were no Jews in government, people were inclined to blame Jews for everything. Some people blamed Jewish wives.

"Now, Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky, Barshakov and the rest can all legitimately say that the President is surrounded by Jews," he said. "I mean, you have Livshits, Chubais, Nemtsov, Koch, Yurenson- etcetera, etcetera, etcetera," he added, in English.

"Sure, it's risky," said Rabbi Beryl Lazar of the Moscow Jewish Community Center. "If something goes wrong, Jews will be blamed. Jews will be blamed anyway."

"Russia is sitting on a social explosion," said one Jewish analyst in a prominent Russian-American human rights group, who declined to give his name. "Anti-Semites will not fail to take advantage of the prevalence of Jews in the seats of power. There will be a reaction."

Even right-wing propagandists say that coming to power was, in some respects, bad for Jews. Aleksandr Prokhanov, editor of the hard-right newspaper Zavtra, said that the ascendancy of Jews was propitious for rightist propagandists like his staff.
"It shows we were right all along," he said.

For Jews to be in Moscow at all, much less in the Kremlin, is a stunning accomplishment considering the historical obstacles Russia has thrown their way throughout its history. From the 1500s on, one Tsar after another thought up new ways to ban Jews from living and working anywhere near the capital. Ivan the Terrible banned Jews from residency in Muscovy in the 1550s, while Tsar Fyodor, a little more than 100 years later, one-upped him by disallowing Jewish traders from even setting foot in the capital.

And even in the 1800s, after Russia took over Poland and assumed the world's largest Jewish population-over 6 million at one point-the combined Jewish population in Russia's two capitals never surpassed 30,000.

Jews were briefly a very influential group around the time of the Russian revolution; the "Jewish Bund" political party even played a significant role in agitating against the Tsar in the years leading up to his abduction.

Beyond that, the Menshevik and Bolshevik parties were both well-represented by Jews. One British scholar in the 1930s even estimated that there were 154 Jews in the party of 200 that escorted Lenin on his famous train ride back to Russia during World War I.

How many of these stories are apocryphal is difficult to say, but the mere fact that, had it not been for Stalin, Russia's second communist leader would likely have been a Jew is evidence enough that the revolution at least temporarily relaxed Russia's choke hold on its Jewish population.

However, Jews became a primary target for reactionary propaganda again after World War II, and from then on they continued to play the role of chief scapegoat for all Russia's problems.

It wasn't until after the Soviet Union collapsed that Jews began to propose what had previously been unthinkable: giving Jews the power the blame suggested they should already have. Yavlinsky in 1995, then considered a serious candidate for the Presidency, was the first prominent Jew to discuss this openly.

"If it's true that people say that Jews are to blame for everything," he said, "then maybe it would take a Jew being in charge to get it all fixed." Clearly, a great many Russians agreed with Yavlinsky. The classic Jewish reputation for solid work habits, intellectualism and business acumen brought them new respect in the brutal free-for-all meritocracy that evolved in Russia after the fall of communism. In fact, a poll conducted by the public opinion firm VTsIOM has clearly shown national respect for Jews on the rise. The poll, published in this year's May 29 issue of Moskovskiye Novosti, showed that while in 1993 just 68% of Russians were sympathetic to Jews (against 17% who feared or distrusted them), some 90% were sympathetic by 1996. For some, like Lazar, this just shows that Russian anti-Semitism is a significantly overpublicized phenomenon.

"Of course there is anti-Semitism here," said Lazar. "But I don't think that it is worse than anywhere else."

Minkin, however, disagrees. "I'd like to see the results of a poll where the questions were properly formulated," he said. "In that poll, people were asked how they personally felt about Jews. People don't like to admit to anti-Semitism. But I think if you asked people how other people felt about Jews, you'd get a different answer entirely."

Another reason there has been little talk about the issue is that it is so sensitive that the press has been loath to report it. Although the rise of Jews in government has been a hot topic of discussion among Western journalists for some time now, no one dared to touch it until the New York Times came out with their piece this year.

Even Russian publications have avoided the story; among mainstream papers, the New York-based Novoye Russkoye Slovo (which, incidentally, has a predominantly Jewish staff) has been the only one to tackle the issue in depth. And it took a paper as notorious as the eXile to point out the obvious and extremely uncomfortable phenomenon of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion appearing, superficially, to come true in real life.

Even for this article, more than half of the interview subjects approached refused to be quoted, even when they had nothing offensive to say. In fact, even discussing who among Russia's leaders is Jewish and who isn't is problematic in itself-and this, according to Lazar, is part of the problem.

"I think that public figures who openly say that they are Jewish and are proud of it are generally well-received," he said. "It's when they aren't up front about it that people sense a soft spot, and feel that people are hiding something."

Is Chubais, about whose nationality little is widely known aside from the fact that he is half Latvian, one of those people?

"Yes," Lazar said.

Only a very few of Russia's new Jewish elite are open about their heritage. Berezovsky and Yavlinsky speak openly about being Jewish, and Gusinsky is the head of the Russian Jewish Congress, but the list more or less ends there. The remainder are identified largely either by Jewish-sounding names and/or ambiguous responses to inquiries about nationality. Thus, journalists generally call attention to Nemtsov's Jewishness by printing his full name (his patronymic is Naumovich), while Zhirinovsky is to this day often referred to as a son of a lawyer.

Another reason the current configuration of the Russian government and banking world may prompt an anti-Semitic backlash is the perception, brought about by the numerous kompromat wars played out in the Russian press, that many of the Jews in power are corrupt. Berezovsky has been damaged by exposes about his early business practices as head of LogoVAZ, Khordakovsky by details of Menatep's loans-for-shares acquisitions, and Chubais by accusations of everything from tax evasion to suppression of criminal investigations to auction-rigging.

Curiously, many people attribute the darkening of the reputations of prominent Jews to anti-Semitic bias in the press, even though, as often as not, it is Jews like Minkin who are doing the reporting in question.

"Often it is the Jews themselves who are the most sensationalist," said Lazar. "For instance, one of the newspapers which has written the most negative material about Jews is Moskovsky Komsomolets-and this is a paper which itself is about 70% Jewish."

If Jews as a whole develop the reputation of being corrupt as a result of bad press about people like Chubais and Berezovsky, then they will be victims of circumstance. In the current pure Darwinist political climate, only the absolutely ruthless can make it to the top.

But if someone like Berezovsky proves to be ruthless, it won't, most analysts agree, be because he's a Jew; it will be because he learned how to do business in Soviet Russia, in an illegal second economy that by its very nature was dangerous and unscrupulous. The Russo-Soviet school, with its Machiavellian politics and and primitive underground capitalism, is where all of Russia's current leaders, Jewish or not, were born and bred.

Unfortunately, appearance is all that matters when it comes to the threat of anti-Semitic reaction.

"The current scenario allows nationalists to suggest that Jews are taking over the world economy," said Minkin. "It doesn't matter whether there is actually a conspiracy or not."

Will it happen again? If history is any guide, it probably will. Jews have been persecuted throughout history when they weren't in charge. Now, in Russia, they're at the helm. Only Russians know for sure how long the reprieve will last.