Eusebio R. Sheffield 
In early 1917, shortly after the deposition of the last Russian Tsar, the Provisional Government of the Russian Empire abolished all restrictions on the civil rights of its Jews. Until then, Jews were largely confined to the settlement area along the Empire’s western border, faced quotas in schools, and suffered other forms of occupational, economic, and political discrimination. For about six months, until the October Revolution that overthrew the Provisional Government and brought the Bolsheviks to power, Russian Jews enjoyed genuine political and religious freedom (at least by the standards of the time).
When the Bolsheviks took power, this short-lived political freedom disappeared for all citizens of the Empire, including its Jews. After establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the Communists banned all other political parties. In practice, Soviet citizens now had fewer voting rights than under the Tsar after the 1905 revolution, which had led to the creation of a representative legislative assembly based on a multiparty system.
The officially atheist Communist Party also suppressed religious practice and institutions. This included the imprisonment and even assassination of religious leaders, the destruction of places of worship (or their repurposing for secular purposes), and the suppression of religious education. For Soviet Jews, this meant that most synagogues were abolished, rabbis were either forced out or violently repressed, and the Hebrew language and religious instruction were virtually banned, replaced by an officially sanctioned Yiddish culture that preached the new Bolshevik religion. It was nothing less than a state-sponsored effort to wipe out Jewish culture and traditions throughout the empire.
Nevertheless, many Russian Jews welcomed the Bolshevik regime. They represented a disproportionate number in early Soviet governments and state institutions (as did other ethnic groups deprived of such opportunities in the Russian Empire). Despite new prohibitions on their religious, ideological, and social practices, by the 1920s Soviet Jews excelled in Soviet political, cultural, and professional life.
During the early years of the USSR, Soviet Jews continued to enjoy the (relative) legal equality first granted to them by the Provisional Government. Anti-Semitism has even been officially banned by the government. In return, they had to sacrifice the ability to practice their religion, one of the few rights granted to them by the tsars (albeit with various restrictions). However, this de facto legal equality will disappear after the Second World War, while remaining de jureuntil the collapse of the USSR.
Shortly after the Holocaust, Stalin launched what historians have called “the dark years of Soviet Jewry,” when the government forced Jews in the Empire out of prestigious professions and universities, stopped and in many cases murdered Jewish leaders and fomented an anti-Jewish hysteria atmosphere throughout the USSR. Stalin’s death in 1953 ended the worst of this official anti-Semitism, but Soviet Jews would continue to face unofficial discrimination and legal inequality. This took the form of academic and professional quotas, the widespread dissemination of state-sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda disguised as the fig leaf of anti-Zionism, and arbitrary refusals by the government to let them emigrate. This legal and unofficial discrimination only began to fade during the last years of perestroika and glasnost, before disappearing with the Soviet Union.
What does this have to do with Jews in Russia today? Like their ancestors under the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, Jews in Russia and other nations of the former USSR are free to practice their religion without government interference. Like the Jews of the early years of the Soviet Union, they have excelled politically, economically, and culturally in Russia since the collapse of communism. And in recent years, just like those early Soviet Jews, they had to sacrifice one kind of freedom for another. While the former had to give up their religious freedom for political equality, Jews in Russia today find themselves increasingly losing the political freedom they (and other Russian citizens) have known. after the collapse of the USSR, while successfully defending their freedom of worship.
While the relative political freedom of the Yeltsin era has steadily eroded under Putin’s (and Medvedev’s) rule, it has taken a nose dive since the escalation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Since then, the government has shut down what little remained of Russia’s independent press. He passed laws allowing Russians to be imprisoned only for criticizing his attack on Ukraine, which the government calls a “special military operation”, or even calling it a “war” or “invasion”. The government jailed opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza on unsubstantiated charges of “extremism” and “terrorism”, after first poisoning them.
Russia’s 150,000 Jews are now watching developments between their government and community leaders with impatience, wondering if (and how) it will affect the undisturbed religious freedom they have enjoyed since the fall of communism. Jewish religious and communal leaders have faced increasing pressure from the Russian government in recent months to publicly support its invasion of Ukraine. Like the Chief Rabbi of Moscow Pinchas Goldschmidt, most refused to do so. Goldschmidt, who is also president of the Conference of European Rabbis, is now in exile in Israel. Rabbi Berel Lazar of Chabad, one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, called for an end to the ‘madness’ of the invasion and demanded an apology from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after claiming on Italian television that Hitler had Jewish roots.
Thousands of Russian Jews have emigrated since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2014. Since then, Israel has seen its largest influx of Russian Jews since the fall of the USSR. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who also served as the country’s first ambassador to the USSR, said “pessimism is a luxury a Jew can never afford.” If pessimism is a luxury, it is one that the Jews of the former Soviet Union have too often refused to their detriment. As the history of Russia and its Jews has shown time and time again, even when things have been getting better for a while, they can always get worse again. Amid a Russian economy facing its biggest decline in decades, pessimism is a luxury Russian Jews should allow themselves when planning their future in (or out of) the country.
Oleg Ivanov is a freelance writer and editor.
