The riots in Dagestan and the change of policy in the Kremlin are revived in a traumatic way and cause deep unrest.
During Vladimir Putin’s more than two decades in office, he presented himself as a protector of the Jewish community and last year introduced an invasion with the ostensible aim of “denazifying” Ukraine.
But the scenes of violence in Makhachkala, Dagestan, this week, as well as photographs of locals searching for Israeli passport holders at a hotel in the city of Khasavyurt, are reminiscent of darker moments in Russian history, when Cossacks swept through Jewish communities as local authorities. Looked.
For some Russian Jewish leaders, the Kremlin’s recent geopolitical pivot on Israel, which has introduced a ground invasion of Gaza as a nod to anti-Semitism, played a direct role in last week’s events in Dagestan.
“By meeting with Hamas last week and condemning the massacres, it is possible that the Kremlin has given the green light to some elements in the Caucasus that the hunting season [against Jews] is open,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow. which left in 2022 after Russia introduced its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
This week, Putin sought to show that he was willing to convene his security council over the unrest and temporarily step aside from his duties because of attacks abroad. Others wondered how a country with so much authority could have allowed riots to occur.
“I think since everything in Russia is strictly controlled through the government, is that those riots were not provoked or directed through a government structure,” Goldschmidt said. “That’s my confidence and I’m not the only one. “
However, Dagestan, an impoverished region with towering mountain ranges in Russia’s far south, has proven to be a challenge to the Kremlin. Moscow has spent decades trying to quell an Islamist insurgency in the country, where more than 90% of the population identifies as Muslim, and is still struggling to find a solution to poverty and high unemployment.
It has served as a hotbed of political protests. Last year, it hosted some of the country’s largest anti-mobilization protests, when Putin called in thousands of troops for his invasion of Ukraine, and in 2020 it sparked conspiratorial protests against the coronavirus. -Related quarantines.
Earlier this summer, spontaneous protests erupted after electricity and water were cut off for more than a week in the city of Izberbach. Later, the citizens of Makhachkala protested, claiming that they had lost electricity for days or weeks. The trend has been repeated in other cities.
“Dagestan is a territory with huge problems, big infrastructure problems, and when it comes to Gaza, some local channels share two photographs: Gaza without electricity and [the city of Dagestan] Khasavyurt without electricity,” said Akhmet Yarlykapov, a senior researcher at the Gaza Press. Or they are Muslims, but the real reasons for those occasions lie in Dagestan’s internal problems. “
The war in Gaza has sparked a wave of anger among Russian Muslims, especially in the poorer North Caucasus. Ziyatdin Uvaisov, an activist and director of Patient Monitor, a Dagestan-based NGO that defends the rights of doctors and patients, said that 95 percent of Dagestan were “really about Israeli crimes perpetrated in Palestine,” but had been prevented from doing so by the local government. Organize events.
“If there had been an ordinary meeting, it is conceivable that other people would have calmed down, acted rationally, learned that there are limits. . . When it’s not passed within the bounds of the law, then you end up with a riot,” he said.
He said he didn’t travel to Makhachkala airport because: “I understand that with this big gathering of disorganized people anything can happen, that maybe they do something wrong. . . other people were angry. “
He argued that most of Dagestan’s citizens had anti-Israel perspectives not because they were anti-Semitic but because of the war, and said there is no violence against the region’s well-established Jewish community, which is largely founded in the southern city of Derbent. .
Still, shocking photographs of Dagestan youths chasing airport travelers they thought had arrived from Israel stunned the world, and members of the local Jewish network quickly expressed fears that they would be next.
As the attack unfolded, Ovadya Isakov, a prominent Jewish rabbi in the region and spokesman for the Dagestan Jewish network, told the Russian newspaper Podyom that the 700 to 800 families, the last of the Jewish network in the mountains of Dagestan, whose origins date back to the seventh century, we would possibly have to leave for other parts of Russia. But he added: “Is it worth leaving, since Russia is not our savior and there have also been pogroms in Russia?
Grigory Shvedov, editor-in-chief of Caucasian Knot, a news site covering the region that recently published a timeline of attacks on local rabbis in Dagestan, said, “Anti-Semitism has been there. “
He added: “This is nothing new. Many other people, whole generations of Jews have left, I know other people on the net and they say they have felt this anti-Semitism. Thank God we still don’t have any stories of attacks on local communities. Because it can happen at any time.
“The most serious risk at the moment is not the mood and movements similar to those of Israeli visitors,” he said, referring to the events at Makhachkala airport. “The real risk lies in a shift in focus from anti-Israel to anti-Semitic. National and regional security could not protect Jews from attack. “
Rabbi Isakov knows this better than anyone. He slightly survived an assassination attempt in 2013, when he was shot by a gunman in Derbent. And his space was also trashed in 2007.
As officials in Dagestan and Moscow tried to create an air of calm this week, Isakov disappeared from public view. The calls he received this week went unanswered.
He had previously said: “I don’t feel safe, even though the synagogue is guarded. He remembers that a local policeman warned one of the rabbi’s fans that she was complicit in the deaths of young people in Palestine. “, you can expect worse. “
Researchers say they have noticed a decline in anti-Semitism across Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, with attacks on Jews and populations in Russia in a single year. But Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, denounced a “latent anti-Semitism that, especially in disenfranchised groups, can kick in when other people are incredibly agitated. “
During the Tsarist era, widespread anti-Semitism fueled pogroms or anti-Jewish riots against Jewish communities in cities such as Chișinău, Odessa, and Białystok, as the government did little or engaged in looting and killing.
There was official anti-Semitism in Soviet times under Joseph Stalin and his successors, such as Leonid Brezhnev. The mood mirrored Soviet relations with Israel, which became tougher when Moscow broke off diplomatic relations after the 1967 Six-Day War.
Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist founded in the United States, spoke of occasional anti-Semitism in “everyday life” as a child in the 1960s. On the trams and in Moscow’s department stores, Russians called her and her sister, zhidovochki, a derogatory term. For Jewish girls, and their classmates grabbed the red “pioneer” handkerchiefs used during the Communist youth movement and said, “You Jews can do it. “I won’t be a pioneer.
Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, she said she had witnessed an extensive propaganda campaign on television with anti-Semitic content that she said was aimed at currying favor with Iran and other countries critical of Israel and the United States.
“[Putin] is still seeking to identify some kind of anti-American unit, as was the case in the Cold War,” he said. “Putin needs to become a leader of the South. They made the decision that the time was right: “The world was about to split into two parts again. “That’s what drives Russian propaganda. “
As a child, the story goes, Putin maintained friendly relations with his Orthodox Jewish neighbors and at times shied away from anti-Semitic jokes, but that has changed in recent years. When Anatoly Chubais, his former economic adviser, was rumored to have been granted Israeli citizenship, he referred to him as “a safe Moshe Israeilevich. “
“There is a direct relationship between these jokes and senior officials and the belief of permissiveness when it comes to attacks on Jews,” said Tanya Lokshina, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Russian officials have indulged in much more competitive rhetoric toward Jews, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying last year, “I would possibly be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood,” downplaying a question about Ukrainian President Volodymyr’s Jewish origins. Smart Jews say the most ardent anti-Semites are Jews,” he added.
Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center in Moscow, a non-governmental organization that monitors extremism, said: “The government used to crack down on anti-Semitic rhetoric, but we have noticed a replacement since the war in Ukraine. We saw a similar rise in anti-Semitism in 2014, the fighting in Donbass. When state propaganda becomes more aggressive, anti-Semitism increases. “
A few days before the riots at Makhachkala airport, anonymous Telegram channels posted addresses of synagogues in Stavropol, Krasnodar, Sochi, Nalchik and Derbent, as well as photographs of rabbis, Isakov added.
Still, the government raised eyebrows when, a few days later, some of the same Telegram channels began calling on Dagestan to intercept the flight arriving from Tel Aviv to Makhachkala airport, paving the way for unrest.
“The government was not in a position to do so. They have all the equipment at their disposal to combat devout dissidents, political dissidents, foreign agents. . . but they are not in a position to combat action as opposed to direct action,” said Shvedov, the editor. chief of Caucasian Knot. ” I think for public servants it’s an absolute mistake in their work, it came out of nowhere. “
Lokshina drew a parallel with the coup d’état introduced by Eugene Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner, whose troops controlled the city of Rostov and began a march on Moscow under the noses of the Russian army.
“There’s like little chimneys everywhere,” Lokshina said. “And where will the next fireplace take place?