Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on David’s Tent, a ministry of Israeli believers Avner and Rachel Boskey. The Boskey’s have ministered at Tabernacle of David, and we consider them trustworthy and Biblically sound.
This is the second of a three-part newsletter considering the subject of Russian propaganda and disinformation regarding their purported reasons for invading and destroying Ukraine. President Putin and state-controlled Russian media repeatedly stress that Ukraine is being run by neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.
This second newsletter weighs Russia’s role (both in history past and present) in propagating and encouraging anti-Semitic theories and practices, including its use of terrorism and its strengthening of modern neo-Nazi movements.
An anti-Nazi invasion?
At dawn on February 24, 2022 Russian President Vladimir Putin announced: “Focused on their own goals, the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine . . . We will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”
On Friday February 25 Putin also described the leadership of Ukraine as “that gang of junkies and neo-Nazis that are holed up in Kiev and holding hostage the entire Ukrainian nation”
And on February 26, the state-run RIA news agency stated that Russia “for the second time in history will take on the burden of responsibility for the liberation of Ukraine from Nazism.”
In our upcoming third newsletter, an analysis of Putin’s claims regarding Nazism in Ukraine will be presented. For now, this second newsletter will examine Russian history – its own words and deeds regarding anti-Semitism, its own support for both neo-Nazi activities and anti-Jewish terrorism. The question to be answered in this newsletter is: What is Moscow’s track record regarding its own moral behavior in these matters? Has Russia’s leadership convinced the Jewish people in recent history that Russia will protect Jewish culture, the Jewish language and Jewish national identity? If Russia fails at both these tests, then her justification for her invasion of Ukraine is both morally bankrupt and ethically fraudulent.
Putin is surfing on a wave he hasn’t created
In Russia, calling someone a Nazi is considered ‘fighting words’ – words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”. An estimated 24 million Soviet citizens died fighting Nazi armies in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is called. When Putin’s ‘tag-team’ political partner Dmitri Medvedev (Deputy Chairman of the Security Council) accuses Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of have betrayed his ethnic identity to serve neo-Nazis, and that he is acting like a Jewish Sonderkommando (those incarcerated Jews forced on pain of death to dispose of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust), Russia is once again playing its anti-Semitic card in all its putrid glory.
Yet the foamy wave of virulent anti-Semitism upon which Putin is surfing is not new; it goes back many centuries, as Senator Joe Biden said in his statement to the 106th Congress on February 24, 1999: “Over the centuries the phenomenon of anti-Semitism has become a sickening metaphor for man’s inhumanity to man and, thus, a topic of universal significance. Sad to say, anti-Semitism has a long history in Russia.”
Vyacheslav Likhachev, world expert on the ideology and activity of far-right groups in Russia and Ukraine, political extremism, and the history of anti-Semitism, states clearly: “Anti-Semitism was a major feature of both late Tsarist and Stalinist as well as neo-Stalinist Russian politics . . . Anti-Semitism is alive and well in contemporary Russia, in general, and in her political life, in particular.” Likhachev’s book Political anti-Semitism in post-Soviet Russia is a ‘Who’s Who’ of Russian political anti-Semitism.
Pogroms and Protocols
Most of the world is not that aware of Russia or of her history. Winston Churchill expressed these sentiments well, when he said that Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Yet many English-speakers are acquainted with the word ‘pogrom.’ Pogrom is a Russian word meaning ‘to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.’ In 1908 Murray’s New English Dictionary defined the word: “Pogrom. Devastation. Destruction. An organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class, chiefly applied to those directed against the Jews.”
The pogrom received international fame in the play/movie ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ where the Gentile constable warns Tevye that there is soon going to be a ‘little unofficial demonstration’ – a pogrom in Anatevka. That violent tragedy occurred at the wedding celebration of Tevye’s daughter Tzeitl and Mottel the tailor. Senator Biden commented: “High ranking government officials blamed the Jews for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and in the succeeding decades officially tolerated, well-armed gangs called the Black Hundreds carried out murderous pogroms against the defenseless Jewish population.”
The Black Hundreds (Chernosotentsi – Черносо́тенцы) were reactionary, antirevolutionary, and anti-Semitic groups formed in Russia during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. The most notable were the ‘League of the Russian People’ (Soyuz Russkogo Naroda), the ‘League of the Archangel Michael’ (Soyuz Mikhaila Arkhangela), and the ‘Council of United Nobility’ (Soviet Obedinennogo Dvoryanstva). Active from 1906 until 1914, they conducted pogroms against the Jews and attacks against various revolutionary groups – all with the unofficial approval of the government. Steven Zipperstein in his Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, states “that no fewer than one hundred thousand Jews were murdered in these offhandedly brutal horrors, and at least that many girls and women raped and countless maimed between 1918 and 1920.”
The most famous pogrom was that of Kishinev, in the Bessarabia Governate of the Russian Empire. The riot was stirred up by false rumors that local Jews had killed a Christian youth and used his blood for demonic rituals. This anti-Semitic legend (called a ‘blood libel’) has medieval roots, appearing in 12th century England, and then spreading to France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and the Russian Empire.
On Easter Sunday, April 19, 1903, after Kishinev church services had ended, gangs of youths began attacking Jewish homes and shops amid shouts of “Kill the Jews!” Their two-day rampage ended with 49 people dead, many women raped, hundreds injured, and much destruction of property. Local police failed to intervene, and the violence ended only when Russian army troops began to patrol the streets and make arrests.
Protocols and paranoia
A literary spark to the highly flammable anti-Semitic tinder blowing across Europe was found in the pen of Pavel Krushevan, a journalist, publisher and official in Imperial Russia. Active in the Black Hundreds and in the Kishinev pogrom, he was known for his ultra-nationalist and stridently anti-Semitic views. He was also the first publisher (Fall of 1903) of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Saint Petersburg’s newspaper Znamya.
Krushevan’s booklet was a clumsy fabrication, with approximately 160 passages plagiarized from a French original that never mentioned Jews – the political satire Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, or The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, authored by Maurice Joly in 1864. Ukrainian scholar Vadim Skuratovsky presents extensive literary, historical and linguistic analysis of the original text of the Protocols and traces influences of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s prose.
The Protocols are a Russian staple of anti-Jewish propaganda to this day. The book ostensibly reports discussions among a secret group of Jewish elders, regarding plans to subvert Christian civilization and erect a world Davidic-Zionist state. According to the book’s worldview, the rise of liberalism has provided Jews with the tools to destroy Christian institutions – the nobility, the church, the sanctity of marriage. Their plan is to take control of the world as revenge against Christianity. The text focuses on supposed Jewish control of banking, media and elections. It is stated that a new world order will be seized by this cunning elite, who have purportedly schemed throughout the ages, planning to enslave humankind until the end of time. According to the authors of this anti-Semitic propaganda, the attempts to modernize Russia in the late 1800’s were actually a Jewish plot to control the world.
Eventually the Protocols became an instrument for blaming Jews for the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were depicted as an overwhelmingly Jewish movement zealously dedicated to executing the Protocol’s ‘plan.’ Russian forces opposed to democratic parliamentarianism, urbanization, and capitalism drew encouragement from this booklet’s twisted perspectives.
Where Nazism and Communism meet
Both Communism and Capitalism are seen in the Protocols as evil means used by Jews in their drive to achieve world domination. And to complicate matters, in real life both Communism and Nazism saw the Jewish people, Judaism and Zionism as the greatest threat to the whole world. Hitler’s speeches and writings incessantly hammered on that theme. Below are some revealing quotes from both KGB and Russian Presidential sources on how seriously they believed in the reality of imaginary Protocol-like threats from all things related to the Jewish people.
According to KGB documents in the Mitrokhin archives (smuggled out of Russia and now safely stored in Cambridge, England), the KGB and Politburo heads saw the Zionist and Jewish movements as a clear and present danger to world peace and to the integrity of the Soviet empire – “a danger which is only second to the main enemy, the United States.” “Moscow Center was obsessed with the ‘Zionist subversion’ against the Soviet Union,” notes Professor Christopher Andrew, historian of the British intelligence community.
Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent Russian dissident, came back to Moscow as a historian in the early 1990s and managed to photocopy documents in the Kremlin archive. He discovered a transcription of a top secret report that KGB head Yuri Andropov had submitted to the Politburo in March 1975, in which he stated that foreigners sending matzah to Russian Jews was clearly a dangerous counter-revolutionary act: “The delivery of these packages (of matzah) clearly intensifies the negative processes the Jewish population in the USSR is undergoing, strengthens their nationalist feelings and their support of emigration (to the West). The KGB believes the matzah arriving from abroad must be confiscated immediately.”
In 1982 all the top KGB brass met in Leningrad for a conference on Zionism. The Mitrokhin archives noted that the conference’s speeches stressed the “extensive subversive activity of the Zionist centers around the world and their infiltration into decision-making centers in different countries,” and claimed that “the Zionist organizations are affecting some countries’ foreign policy and aggravating conflicts around the world.” The conference further stressed that “there is not a single negative incident in socialist countries that Zionists are not involved in.”
In the Summer of 1982, Vladimir Kryuchkov (later appointed head of the KGB) issued a “work plan for fighting Zionism” stressed that “Zionism is the main threat to the USSR and to the Soviet bloc.”
Where Nazism, Communism and Zionism meet
The KGB saw the Jewish people, Judaism and Zionism as a devilish trident, the source of much of the world’s evil. Significant efforts were made to block Jewish cultural and religious expressions, and Jewish emigration from Russia. Strenuous efforts were also made to stir up Russian hatred against Jews in general and Zionism in particular.
The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (AKSO) was established on March 29, 1983 by the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. AKSO activities were supervised jointly by representatives of the Department of Propaganda of the Central Committee and by the KGB. AKSO depicted Zionism as a reactionary appendage of world imperialism. Two main themes of AKSO’s propaganda were:
- that the State of Israel served as the striking force of American imperialism in the Middle East, using Nazi-like methods to accomplish its goals
- that so-called International Zionism, seeking world hegemony, served American imperialism by fomenting anti-Soviet feeling abroad and spreading lies about the persistence of a ‘Jewish Question’ in the USSR
In 1983, a Russian book On the Course of Aggression and Fascism detailed Zionism’s alleged ‘criminal alliance with the Fascists’ and blamed the Zionists for the extermination of non-Zionist Jews during the Holocaust. In a 1983 a Pravda article announcing the launch of AKSO declared Zionism a concentration of ‘extreme nationalism, chauvinism, and racial intolerance, justification of territorial seizure and annexation, armed adventurism, a cult of political arbitrariness and impunity, demagogy and ideological sabotage, sordid maneuvers and perfidy.’ A 1985 TASS radio broadcast commenting on one of the committee’s English-language brochures announced: “Zionist leaders are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. It is precisely the Zionists who assisted the Nazi butchers by helping them to make up the lists of the doomed inmates of ghettoes, escorting the latter to the places of extermination and convinced them to resign to the butchers.”
In 1977 Soviet Weekly, a Soviet English-language outlet that targeted the United Kingdom, printed a piece titled ‘Why We Condemn Zionism,’ proclaiming Zionism to be a racist doctrine and characterized Israelis as ‘worthy heirs to Hitler’s National-Socialism.’
Where Nazism, Communism and Palestinian terror meet
The current President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was once a KGB agent whose operational name was ‘Krotov,’ according an internal KGB report. Abbas functioned as an authorized and undercover KGB spy within the PLO.
Abbas received his Ph.D. from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University/ Institute of Oriental Studies in 1982. The university’s president at the time was Yevgeny Primakov, later head of the KGB First Chief Directorate. Primakov then served as Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and subsequently as Russia’s Prime Minister.
Abbas’s dissertation was published as an Arabic book in 2011 under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. Passages from the book describe alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust and cast doubt on the number of Holocaust victims. Abbas wrote that the Mossad abducted Adolf Eichmann in order to prevent the high-ranking Nazi from revealing the secret of Zionists’ role in the Final Solution.
One year after Abbas’ dissertation was approved, a speaker by the name of Yuri Kolesnikov claimed at a press conference of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (Moscow, June 1983), that during the war the Zionists were “in league with the Gestapo and SS” and that the Israelis executed Eichmann years later “to prevent the ‘sacred secrets’ of this collaboration from becoming public.” From this, it seems that both Abbas and Kolesnikov were studying from the same KGB playbook.
Where Palestinian terror meets Russian training and weapons
Israeli intelligence reporter Ronen Bergman conveys that a former senior Fatah official once told him that the “Soviet Union and its intelligence services greatly and significantly aided the Palestinian struggle for independence.” This can be seen in three ways:
- The KGB targeted the Jewish state with deep-cover ‘illegals,’ whose job was to penetrate the highest echelons of Israeli political, military and intelligence worlds
- The KGB and related intelligence agencies (East Germany Stasi, Bulgarian and Polish intelligence, Syrian Air Force intelligence, as well as the West German Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Italian Red Brigades) trained terrorist operatives from:
- PLO/Al-Fatah – Yasser Arafat, Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, etc.
- Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP; George Habash, Wadi Haddad)
- Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP; Nayef Hawatmeh)
- Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC; Ahmed Jibril)
- These KGB-trained and KGB-armed terrorists carried out many horrendous attacks against Jews and Israelis, including the few listed below:
- EL AL Algeria (July 1968)
- TWA 840 Damascus hijacking (August 1969)
- Dawson’s Field-Zarka, Jordan hijackings EL AL/TWA/Pan Am (September 12, 1970; led to the Black September massacres)
- Coral Sea oil tanker attack (1971)
- Athens airport attack on EL AL offices (July 1973)
- Assassination of US Ambassador Francis E. Meloy, Jr. (Beirut 1976)
- Entebbe Air France hijacking (June-July 1976)
- Thwarted suitcase bombing of London EL AL 016 (Nezar Hindawi; April 1986)
Russian cooperation with Nazis
Russian cooperation with the Nazi regime goes back to the Soviet Union’s Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) – a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that enabled those two powers to partition Poland between them, while delaying open war between Germany and the USSR. It was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and lasted until Nazi Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941. This pact should not be understood as signifying undying love and devotion between Russia and the Nazis. Today, however, it is dangerous to discuss this pact openly on Russian media, due to the threat of penalties (including fines and long jail terms).
Russian concealment of Nazi atrocities
Between September 29–30, 1941, 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in a massacre carried out by the Einsatzgruppe C, located at the Kyiv clay pits of Babi Yar. By November 1941, the number of Jews shot dead at Babi Yar exceeded 75,000, according to an official report written by SS commander Paul Blobel.
In the period after 1945 the Soviet Union refused to recognize Babi Yar as a Jewish Holocaust site, or that mass murder of Jews had occurred at Babi Yar. Victims were only described generically as Soviet citizens. Mention of their Jewish identity was not permitted, nor the mentioning of the participation of the local police. There were plans to turn the site into a park and a stadium. William Korey, Anti-Defamation League director, stated that “Soviet authorities suppressed any public discussion of the Holocaust and attempted to obliterate the Holocaust in the memories of Soviet Jews as well as non-Jews.” The Nazis obliterated Jews, while the Russians obliterated any memory of the victims’ Jewish identity.
In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem Babiyy Yar in a leading Russian periodical, protesting the Soviet Union’s refusal to recognize Babi Yar as a Holocaust site. The poem’s first line is “There are no monuments over Babi Yar.”
Finally, public pressure resulted in a memorial placed at Babi Yar in 1976, but the inscription reads: “Here in 1941-1943, the German fascist invaders executed more than 100,000 citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war.” Despite the fact that more than 30 per cent of victims killed by the Nazis in Babi Yar were Jews, there was no reference to the uniquely Jewish component of this tragedy. Between 1.5 million and 2.5 million Soviet Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and about 200,000 more died in combat. That added up to 10% of all Soviet deaths, while Jews were only 2.5% of the total pre-war Soviet population.
On September 29, 1991 a menorah-shaped monument to specific remember the more than 75,000 Jews murdered there, was dedicated. It had taken the collapse of the Soviet Union to bring to pass an honorable memorial at that site.
Russian propagation of Nazi propaganda and backing of neo-Nazi activism
It is not common knowledge in the West that a startling rise of neo-Nazi speech, action and influence has been going on in Russia over the past 20+ years.
The first stage involved the repetition and dissemination of Nazi tropes about Jews and Judaism (going back to the 1960’s).
In 1963 Judaism without Embellishments was published by Trofim Kichko. Featuring Der Stürmer-like cartoons, the book stated that Judaism and the concept of Jews as a chosen people are inherently racist, Judaism being a religion linked to American imperialism and Israeli colonialism. One of the cartoons in the book showed a stereotypical Jewish capitalist licking a boot with a swastika painted on it. Though published in Russian and for Russians, the style and content of the book is pure Nazi.
In 1975 the Soviet Union was able to pass General Assembly Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be racism. Though it was later revoked just days before the onset of the First Gulf War on December 16, 1991, the this racist attack on Israel opened a Pandora’s Box of Nazi-like assaults on Israel, Zionism and Jews throughout the world.
The second stage involved Putin’s use of anti-extremism legislation to ‘counter the neo-Nazi threat,’ but in the end it was directed to crush democratic opponents in Russia (early 2000’s).
The third stage involved Putin’s use of ‘managed nationalism’ to co-opt popular neo-Nazi movements into a counterweight to a rising anti-Putin democratic and leftist opposition (early 2000’s).
Russian neo-Nazi movements
What follows are the neo-Nazi groups involved (past and/or present) either officially or unofficially with the KGB and the Russian government.
National Patriotic Front ‘Memory’ (NPF – Pamyat) – started in 1980, grew to 3,000 members and faded out in the early 1990’s. It was a neo-Nazi, neo-fascist, ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist organization that identified itself as the ‘People’s National-Patriotic Orthodox Christian movement.’ In 1991, the organization‘s newspaper had a print run of 100,000, and a radio station was launched.
The group claimed the existence of a so-called ‘Ziono-Masonic plot’ against Russia as “the main source of the misfortunes of Russian people, disintegration of the economy, denationalization of Russian culture, alcoholism, ecological crisis.” They blamed the Zionists for the triggering of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, for the death of millions in the course of the Russian Civil War and for Joseph Stalin’s personality cult. They taught that the Soviet government was infiltrated by ‘Zionists and freemasons’ working as ‘agents of Zionism’ who were subordinating the Soviet government to ‘Jewish capital.’
One of Pamyat’s founders, Valeriy Yemelyanov, was the author of the book ‘Dezionization’ (1980) which called on the Soviet Union to get rid of this alleged Zionist-Masonic conspiracy. Yemelyanov was later committed to an insane asylum after being accused of murdering his wife.
Rodina – In 2003 ‘Rodina’ (‘Motherland’) was established as a coalition of 30 nationalist and far-right groups. Led by Dmitri Rogozin, Sergey Glazyev, Sergey Baburin and other nationalist politicians, the political ideas represented here ran the gamut from neo-Stalinism to ethno-nationalism, xenophobia and neo-fascism.
Russian March – An ill-calculated governmental attempt to ‘harness’ the far right movement was the so-called ‘Russian March’ in 2005. The event turned out to be an openly neo-Nazi action, initially extensively supported by Russian governmental officials. The gatherings embraced reactionary elements within Russian society, from neo-Nazis and monarchists, to neo-pagans and Cossacks.
Russkii Obraz (‘Russian Image’; ‘RO’) – In 2008-09, the Kremlin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. The Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz (‘Russian Image’/’RO’), a hardcore neo-Nazi group best known for its slick journal and its band, Hook from the Right.
In touch with its Kremlin supervisors, RO hosted a concert by the infamous neo-Nazi band Kolovrat in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, within earshot of the Kremlin. RO’s leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, those skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000’s. In 2014, RO’s Aleksandr Matyushin engaged in terrorism against pro-Ukrainians in the Donetsk region as a major field commander with Russian forces.
Dmitri Utkin and the Wagner Group – The Wagner Group was reportedly founded by Dmitri Utkin, a veteran of the First and Second Chechen War. Utkin served as lieutenant colonel and brigade commander of a unit of Special Operations Forces unit operating under Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), in the 700th Independent Spetsnaz Detachment of the 2nd Independent Brigade. The company’s name comes from Utkin’s own military call-sign ‘Wagner’ which he chose in honor of the German racist conductor Richard Wagner (Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer). Utkin is thought to be a neo-Nazi; a reporter from The Economist reported seeing several Waffen SS Nazi tattoos on Utkin’s collarbone and chest. The Wagner Group and Utkin were first active in 2014 in the break-away Luhansk region of Ukraine, fighting on the side of Russia against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Autonomous Nationalists – This Russian neo-Nazi group has been filmed attacking foreigners and setting fire to buildings. They have ties with neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Europe. Members praise the Third Reich and advocate the supremacy of the white race and the superiority of the Russian people.
Neo-Nazi ‘Sparta Battalion’ – Russian warlord Vladimir Zhoga, who headed the Neo-Nazi ‘Sparta Battalion,’ was accused of brutal war crimes and the shooting Ukrainian POWs. Zhoga was shot and killed in Volnovakha, Ukraine fighting on the side of the Russia-instigated break-away Donetsk People’s Republic.
Russian National Unity – In August 1990, a split occurred in Pamyat, and Aleksandr Barkashov dubbed his new group Russian National Unity. The group promoted the veneration of the swastika. The organization was unregistered federally in Russia, but nonetheless collaborated on a limited basis with the KGB’s successor FSB. They advocated neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, the expulsion from Russia of Jews, as well as of Azeris, Georgians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Tajiks. Members wore black or camouflage uniforms, adopting a red and white swastika and expressing admiration for German Nazism. RNU was made illegal in 1999, and had a membership of around 20,000 – 25,000 members at that time.
Selected quotes from Russian political figures:
- Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in November 2016: “If you want to know what will happen in America, who do you have to talk to? You have to talk to the Jews, naturally.”
- General Albert Makashov, Communist Party Deputy in the Russian parliament, called in October 1998 for the extermination of all Jews in Russia and blaming them for the country’s economic problems: “I will round up all the Jews and send them to the next world!” “Who is to blame? The executive branch, the bankers, and the mass media are to blame. Usury, deceit, corruption, and thievery are flourishing in the country. That is why I call the reformers Yid” (Zavtra, October 20, 1998)
- Victor Ilyukhkin, Chairman of the Russian Duma (Parliament)’s Security and Defense Committee, accused President Yeltsin and the Jews (who he claimed are “exclusively” members of his “inner circle”) of committing “genocide” against the Russian people. He also called for ethnic quotas in government posts.
- Communist Party Leader Gennady Zyuganov stated in December 1998, his party’s position on anti-Semitism. In a letter to the Justice Ministry, he declared that Jews should either emigrate, assimilate or live as Jews pledging sole allegiance to Russia. This echoes an infamous quote from Tsar Alexander III’s Minister Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who stated in 1894 that the aim of the Russian government with regard to the Jews was that “a third of Jews will be converted, a third will emigrate, and the rest will die of hunger” (Russian: “Одна треть вымрет, одна выселится, одна треть бесследно растворится в окружающем населении”). Zyuganov added: “Zionism has actually shown itself to be one of the strains of theory and practice of the most aggressive imperialist circles striving for world domination. In this respect it is related to fascism.”
From Lenin to Pravda
In 1914 Vladimir Lenin declared, “No nationality in Russia is as oppressed and persecuted as the Jews.”
Seventy-six years later, in July 1990, the top Russian newspaper Pravda published an editorial admitting that Russia’s anti-Zionist campaign of the previous quarter century was in error. “Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Black Hundreds and of fascist origin. Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general.”
Can it be said that Russia’s leadership has finally grasped the truth regarding its own toxic contributions to murderous attacks on the Jewish people, their religion, their culture and their national identity? Have the Russian people undergone the necessary heart changes that God is seeking for them to experience?
How should we then pray?
- Pray for Russian leaders and common people, that God would give them a heart-changing revelation about the deep roots of Russian anti-Semitism and the gift for focused repentance about these specific issues
- Pray for all those around the world to receive a similar burden and a calling to pray for Russia’s repentance on these issues
- Pray for the raising up of Ezekiel’s prophetic Jewish army throughout the earth
Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.
In Messiah Yeshua,
Avner Boskey
Donations can be sent to:
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BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA
Donations can also be made on-line (PayPal or credit card) through: www.davidstent.org
The post Russia’s propaganda wars: Neo-Nazism and Ukraine – Part Two: Surfing the wave of Russian anti-Semitism appeared first on David's Tent.
