A “Reset” of Russian-Jewish Relations?
By Michael Belinsky
November 2012
When I was ten years old and our Jewish family still lived in St. Petersburg, my father took me to the State Hermitage, then the world’s largest museum. I marveled at its vast collection – and, through it – at Russia’s awesome grandeur. It was the year when my father took me to cultural and historical landmarks throughout the city and supplemented their narratives with stories of Jewish contribution to Russian society. It was the year our family left Russia for America.
Last week, a very different Russia opened a very different museum, one dedicated to the history of the Jewish people in Russia. This $50 million project, the Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance in Moscow, is the largest museum of Jewish history in Europe and the first such museum in Russia. In a symbolic gesture, President Putin contributed a month of his salary to the museum; Israeli President Shimon Peres attended the opening.
Museums are a complex construct. Built in the present, they offer perspectives on the past with a view toward the future. And so, too, Russian society, in a rare moment of increased tolerance, has decided to revisit the past with the goal of resetting the Russian-Jewish relations for the future.
Yet the museum confronts a difficult task. It speaks today to different Jews than the ones who left Russia years ago. Diaspora Jews carry a heavy burden of their parents’ and grandparents’ stories of pervasive Soviet and Russian anti-Semitism. To many of them, Russia is not the country that liberated the Jewish race from the genocidal clutches of Nazi concentration camps. Rather, Russia appears as the country that mistreated its Jewry, reluctantly and slowly opened its borders after the Soviet Empire collapsed, and has consistently picked the wrong geopolitical friends.
From America, Jews read of Russia imperial ambition in the sandbox of the post-Soviet space. Russian newfound tolerance seems at odds with a government that turns off Ukraine’s heat in the winter as a foreign policy tool. Republican-leaning Jews see an American political culture in which the right labels Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” while Democrat-leaning Jews see an America frustrated at each attempt to collaborate with a Russian president who ignores the “reset” and exits the Nunn-Lugar treaty that was designed to safeguard nuclear weapons.
So will Russia succeed in resetting Russian-Jewish relations? This may depend on at least two factors. The first is the extent to which Russia’s political establishment will allow Russian society an honest look at the history of Jews in Russia. In doing so it will face a tension between its ingrained desire to control the historical narrative and the new backlash that such control inevitably generates (even in Russia’s illiberal democracy). So far, control and revision have prevailed. Putin has slowly closed state archives and opened a political propaganda machine that tells Putin’s Russian History through state mouthpieces such as the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests. The Soviet Empire was a masterful political historiographer, erasing faces from photographs and rewriting classroom history books in a flash. My parents are still learning the truth about the country from which they left.
The second may be Russia’s ability to pursue policies that align with Jewish interests. According to the exit polls in the U.S., 69 percent of American Jews, or 3.6 million, voted to re-elect President Obama, with whom Putin has chilly relations. In the Middle East, Russia continues to support regimes that threaten Israel. And in Russia, although tolerance is at an all time high, 8 percent of people polled by the Levada Center prefer that Jews are barred from living in the country; in other words, 11 million Russians want the remaining 200,000 Jews out. There is a Russian Jewish joke: “’Where is the best place for Jews?’ ‘Why, where there are none of us!’”
Russia lacks the geopolitical presence of the Soviet Union. The Diaspora of Jews who emigrated from Russia will not live in fear of a rising anti-Semitic state. We will face, instead, a post-Soviet society in search for an identity in a largely anti-Semitic past – from the Romanov empire to the Soviet empire, from the czar to the general secretary. Acknowledging a guilty past is hard; moving from it is harder still. But unless the Russian government continues its attempts to reset Russian-Jewish relationship not only through museums but also through policy, for most Jews, Russia will remain just that: history.
Michael Belinsky 