{"id":76079,"date":"2020-02-05T17:05:37","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T15:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=76079"},"modified":"2020-02-05T16:06:21","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T14:06:21","slug":"10-05-49","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=76079","title":{"rendered":"A Brave Jewish Voice in Putin\u2019s Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>A Brave Jewish Voice in Putin\u2019s Russia<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Cathy Young<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Yevgenia Albats was called \u2018kikeface\u2019 as a kid in the Soviet Union and went on to become an intrepid reporter in Moscow. Visiting the U.S. recently, she spoke with Tablet about the state of Russian politics and what it\u2019s like for Jews there today.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Boris Nemtsov’s son Anton (second from left) and Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats during a ceremony to unveil a plaque in memory of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov in 2018(Photo: Mikhail Tereshchenko\/TASS via Getty Images)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I first tried to interview Yevgenia Albats in 1990 when I was a journalist on my first trip back to Moscow, the city where I was born and had left 10 years earlier when I emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 16. I was doing research for an article about women and politics in the Soviet Union at a time when the country was in political flux, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, and spaces for political activity had opened up; Albats was one of the leading female voices in the male-dominated field of political journalism. When I approached her at some event and asked for an interview, she was friendly enough but showed little interest in anything that could be labeled as women\u2019s issues. <\/span><\/p>\n

That interview never happened, but over the years I continued to follow Albats\u2019 work both in print and on the radio; she has hosted a weekly show on Ekho Moskvy (\u201cMoscow Echo\u201d), one of Russia\u2019s few remaining independent radio stations, for the past 15 years. She has been a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, earned a Ph.D. in political science from the same, and authored a much-praised book<\/a> on the history of the KGB (a subject she had pursued in the late 1980s as an intrepid reporter in Moscow, tracking down retired torturers for interviews and ignoring death threats to herself and her young daughter). Since 2009, she has been editor in chief of Russia\u2019s most prominent dissident magazine, New Times<\/a>\u2014now online-only\u2014after joining in 2007 as deputy chief editor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Albats was in New York speaking at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on the subject of \u201cJewish Life in Putin\u2019s Russia\u201d\u2014from her vantage point as a journalist, a member of the Russian Jewish Congress board, and simply a Russian Jewish citizen.<\/span><\/p>\n

The evening at YIVO turned out to be fascinating. Albats, who speaks accented but excellent English, talked about everything from crying when she first visited the United States in 1990 and saw black-garbed Orthodox Jews (\u201cI had never imagined that Jews could walk about so freely and so openly\u201d) to the excellence of modern Russia\u2019s kosher supermarket chain, The Kosher Gourmet, to breaking the rules by sitting in the men\u2019s section of a Moscow shul wearing tallit and kippah. (\u201cThe males were terrified, but the rabbi said, \u2018This is a great day\u2014Yevgenia Albats has come to pray with us!,\u2019 and then they suddenly decided that it was fine.\u201d) She talked about her involvement in the Jewish community\u2019s efforts to reclaim Torah scrolls and her own Torah study circle for secular Jews. She \u201ccalled out,\u201d as we would say, a Moscow Chabad rabbi who turned down her request to visit a detained Jewish opposition activist just before Hanukkah, first questioning whether the man was really a Jew and then openly refusing to help \u201cone of those people who are putting us all in danger by speaking against [Vladimir] Putin.\u201d She talked about the disturbing fact that right now, it seems safer to be a Jew in Moscow than in Munich, where synagogues and Jewish cultural centers are now under heavy guard. She talked about the tendency of former Soviet Jews to embrace right-wing populism wherever they go, be it Donald Trump or Binyamin Netanyahu. (\u201cThis illiberal politics is a part of what Soviet Jews brought with them, both to the United States and to Israel.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

To my pleasant surprise, Albats recognized\u2014or at least vaguely remembered meeting me\u2014when I approached her at the post-event reception. Picking up from the interview that never happened 20 years ago, we spent over an hour speaking by phone a few days later. <\/span><\/p>\n

That conversation has been translated from Russian into English edited for length and for clarity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cathy Young: You mentioned in your talk that even as a child going to school on public transport, [in Moscow in the 1960s] you had a sense of being vulnerable as a Jew.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yevgenia Albats: <\/b>When we were little, everyday anti-Semitism was incredibly widespread in the Soviet Union, in Moscow, and anywhere you went it was very easy to get a \u201czhidovskaya morda<\/i>\u201d [literally \u201ckikeface,\u201d a common Russian anti-Semitic slur\u2014ed.<\/i>] thrown at you. When we rode the tram or the bus to school\u2014my sister and I and another Jewish friend\u2014we had a habit of looking around and finding the Jews: \u201cAyid, ayid, ayid.\u201d [\u201c<\/i>Ayid,\u201d from the Yiddish \u201c<\/i>a yid,\u201d was a common euphemism among Soviet Jews.\u2014Tablet] <\/i> They were people from whom we could expect protection. Why? Because one day when I was about 9, my sister and I were coming home from school and several girls in the yard of our building, who had been our playmates, jumped us and ripped off our Young Pioneer scarves, shouting, \u201cYou Yids have no right to wear Pioneer scarves.\u201d [Members of the Young Pioneers, the Communist schoolchildren\u2019s organization, wore red neck scarves with their school uniforms.\u2014Tablet] <\/i>We ran home and started asking our parents who we were and what Yids were, and our parents got a lovely introduction to \u201cthe Ethnic Question\u201d in our building. Years later, I started wondering what was going on; children don\u2019t just start ripping Pioneer scarves off their friends. And then I realized that it was the year of the Six-Day War. The Soviet Union had severed diplomatic relations with Israel, and the newspapers were full of talk about those evil Zionists. And there was, of course, a massive tide of anti-Semitism. <\/span><\/p>\n

CY: When did you first realize that being Jewish\u2014simply having a Jewish last name\u2014would be an obstacle in your career?<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>In 1975, I graduated from high school, and my father and I went to file my application to Moscow State University for the department  of journalism. A man from the admissions board took my dad aside and explained that I didn\u2019t have a chance, given my ethnicity issues. My dad was a true-believer communist, but he also lived in the ivory tower, working for a top-secret research institute and rarely poking his nose out of that world. To him, this was a stunning revelation. <\/span><\/p>\n

At the time in Moscow, there were tutors who coached Jewish kids for the entrance exam. My history tutor, a wonderful historian, Aleksandr Samuilovich Zavadier, said to me, \u201cYou need to know twice as much as any Slavic kid. It\u2019s the only way you can get in.\u201d My English tutor, Abram Alperin, was also a remarkable man. He was an American Jew; in 1935, he and his uncle had the brilliant idea to come to the Soviet Union to build communism. The uncle was shot the following year. [Alperin] fought at Stalingrad and was a violinist in Solomon Mikhoels\u2019 [Jewish theater]. He was an amazingly well-educated man. It was thanks to these two Jewish men that I got into the university.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was the top student in my class, and when still in college I started writing for Komsomolskaya Pravda<\/i>; I wrote about crazy things like mountains and skydiving. Then I graduated [in 1980] and, naturally, couldn\u2019t find a job. The people at Komsomolskaya Pravda<\/i> liked me. But the new editor in chief, a well-known anti-Semite, explicitly said that he wanted young journalists with a different kind of last name, and that was it. Of course, by then I also had ties to refuseniks and yeshiva; that baggage didn\u2019t help.<\/span><\/p>\n

I ended up getting hired as secretary for the letters section of Nedelya<\/i>, the weekly supplement to Izvestia<\/i>. It\u2019s hard to think of a lowlier job. However, I also started to write about science, the only field where I could get a foot in the door. They still tried to make me change my last name [to something] that sounded ethnically Russian. But I had just lost my dad, and that was out of the question.<\/span><\/p>\n

CY: So you were involved in Jewish cultural life even before <\/b>perestroika<\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>Long before. I was probably 14 when I got to know some kids who attended an underground yeshiva in Moscow. We all hung together, celebrated Pesach, did readings of Jewish texts, and so on. My English tutor\u2019s son, who was about to emigrate to the United States, gave me my first Torah, in Hebrew and in English; all this was, naturally, banned in the Soviet Union. He also introduced me to some other clandestine Jewish groups.<\/span><\/p>\n

CY: At what point did it become evident that one could now be openly involved in Jewish cultural life?<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>To be honest, when perestroika began, Jewish cultural life didn\u2019t interest me one bit. I was interested in politics; I\u2019m a classic political animal, and what was happening in politics at the time was just fantastically interesting. That they had also started allowing Jewish refuseniks to leave was just another thing. <\/span><\/p>\n

Jewish life in Russia really began later, [in the mid-1990s], when Jews had amassed enough wealth to make it possible. That was when Jewish oligarchs appeared in the picture\u2014above all, Vladimir Gusinsky, the founder of the MOST financial group which owned the NTV channel. He had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Moscow, and as a kid he got beaten up without mercy. He had learned to fight back, he wasn\u2019t scared of anything, and he loathed anti-Semites. <\/span><\/p>\n

I remember when I got the call in Cambridge, where I was taking classes for my Ph.D., saying that there was going to be a Russian Jewish Congress, and did I want to attend. It was amazing. That first Russian Jewish Congress really did a tremendous amount for Jewish life in Russia. In terms of Jewish self-awareness\u2014Jews realized that they didn\u2019t need to be afraid, that someone would stand up for them. Of course, by then, a million and a half Jews had also emigrated to Israel in the early 1990s, and that was another thing: You knew that there was a country that would protect you. <\/span><\/p>\n

Later in the conversation, Albats and I moved on to the current situation with regard to anti-Semitism in Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia and to the general state of the contemporary Russian political scene.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

YA:<\/b> The thing to understand is that in Russia, there is imperial nationalism and ethnic nationalism. At one point, there was a surge in ethnonationalist groups; the majority of them were directed from the Kremlin. I always said that nationalist groups weren\u2019t dangerous as such: In a politically unstructured society, it\u2019s natural to unite on an ethnic basis. What\u2019s scary is when the banner of nationalism is raised by the state. And that\u2019s what happened under Putin, when nationalist rhetoric became the rhetoric of the regime.<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing is, though, Putin is an imperial nationalist. That whole KGB crowd around him, they\u2019re the same; their golden dream is the rebirth of the Soviet Union. But the rebirth of empire does not tolerate ethnic nationalism, [which] drives people in the empire to kill each other over ethnic hostilities. That is why Putin has done everything he can to destroy ethnonationalism.  All the leaders of Russian nationalist and Nazi groups have been either jailed or recruited and co-opted. There is no Russian nationalist movement apart from the state. And the anti-Semitism that does periodically flare up does, of course, come from the top. I have no doubt that at some point, it will surge. An authoritarian state has to single out an enemy. <\/span><\/p>\n

CY: Haven\u2019t there already been moves to insinuate that the \u201ctreasonous\u201d liberal opposition is mostly Jewish?<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>So far, not much. Of course, at the [Soviet-era] KGB, anti-Semitism was a very strong ideological component. For the KGB, the Jews were a fifth column because they were people who finished Soviet universities and then took off for their \u201chistorical home,\u201d always ready to sell out the Motherland. But today, until such time as the state signs off on it, this is going to be fairly muted.<\/span><\/p>\n

Putin is not an anti-Semite; this is a known fact. But [some of his top allies] are. A wave of anti-Semitism will inevitably come unless we succeed in defeating this regime before it becomes openly fascist. <\/span><\/p>\n

CY: What\u2019s the role of Jewish communities and leaders in Putin\u2019s relationship with religious groups?<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>He has really used Rabbi Ber Lazar, from the Chabad Lubavitcher movement. This is because the chekists<\/i> [from \u201c<\/i>CheKa,\u201d original name of the future KGB<\/i>] devoutly believe in a global Jewish conspiracy and a world Jewish government. When they searched the offices of our magazine [in 2007-2008], the colonel who was in charge said to me, \u201cI realize, Yevgenia Markovna, that you\u2019re going to get the entire Jewish world on its feet. We know [Edgar] Bronfman is a friend of yours.\u201d I may have met Bronfman twice in my life. But I never try to disabuse them of this notion. I tell them, \u201cYes, we run the world.\u201d Let them believe it.<\/span><\/p>\n

CY: Russia\u2019s relations with Israel are also a tangled story.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

YA:<\/b> Putin and Netanyahu are buddies. Putin has been happy to use Netanyahu. He eventually realized that Netanyahu could not help him get the sanctions lifted; even so, he\u2019s flirted with Netanyahu a lot as leverage in the Russian-Turkish relationship. But now, there is this Israeli girl who got arrested with marijuana in her luggage, just in transit through Russia, and now she\u2019s been given a prison sentence of seven or eight years. A nightmare. Netanyahu has personally pleaded with Putin several times. For Putin, it would cost nothing. He could even do it lawfully, because the Russian president has the power to issue pardons. But he\u2019s playing games with Netanyahu, of course. <\/span><\/p>\n

Putin is very popular in Israel [among former Soviet Jews], so Netanyahu uses that; posters of Putin and Netanyahu were everywhere during the election. Many of those Jews emigrated before perestroika, before they had this crucial education about what the Soviet Union really was\u2014even though they may have known this truth in their bones. The Russian \u201cstreet\u201d in Israel is appalling. It\u2019s very reactionary, utterly ignorant of the Torah and Jewish texts. They think any leftist rhetoric is \u201csocialism,\u201d and socialism is anti-Semitism and empty shops. <\/span><\/p>\n

I never try to disabuse them of this notion. I tell them, \u2018Yes, we run the world.\u2019 Let them believe it.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

CY: What do you think of claims that Donald Trump is an \u201cAmerican Putin,\u201d or even a Kremlin asset?<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>No, of course Trump is not an American Putin. I don\u2019t think Trump is Putin\u2019s project. The fact that Russian special services meddled in the American election is well documented in the Mueller report. The idea was to show that elections mean chaos. It was meant, above all, for internal Russian consumption, and no one expected Trump to win. When he did, all of bureaucratic Moscow celebrated his victory. They all hated Hillary, because she said that Putin is essentially a KGB agent, and Putin gets very hurt by personal slights. At the Duma, they actually drank champagne to celebrate Trump\u2019s win. They were totally convinced that he\u2019d lift the sanctions, that he\u2019d listen to Putin, since he was always talking about how much he liked Putin and how great Putin was.<\/span><\/p>\n

art. recommended Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

They just freaked out when they realized that the United States has institutions like Congress, like the Supreme Court and federal district courts. They were flabbergasted when Trump\u2019s [\u201cMuslim ban\u201d] was struck down: A district court can strike down the president\u2019s order?<\/span><\/p>\n

Was there a connection between the Trump campaign and Putin? There was a lot of talk about it. But no evidence was ever found, and if it did exist, it\u2019s too late; it\u2019s been destroyed long ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

CY: What do you think of the Obama administration\u2019s policies toward Russia?<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>Their big mistake was betting on Medvedev. They decided that Medvedev was a serious figure, that Medvedev would run for a second term. They weren\u2019t entirely wrong, because Medvedev did<\/i> want to run. They simply didn\u2019t factor in that he was so weak that the moment Putin said, \u201cDown, boy!\u201d he was down. The other thing\u2014they had a completely false conception of the Russian regime. They kept saying, \u201cMafia state.\u201d But the problem of the Russian regime is not that it\u2019s a mafia state, it\u2019s that the state is run by the political police, the KGB, just under a different name. Once you realize that, you can understand what tools they use, what they\u2019re doing, what to expect. Yet for a very long time, no one understood this. They all focused, and rightly, on corruption. But corruption is only one side of it. What\u2019s really frightening is that power is in the hands of the KGB, the most repressive institution of the Soviet regime which, in the Soviet era, was at least somewhat held in check by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for the simple reason of self-preservation. <\/span><\/p>\n

I think in 2017, I spoke at Harvard about the KGB\u2019s rise to power, and Tim Colton, a well-known academic who had been my dissertation adviser, said when he introduced me, \u201cI remember how in 1993, Zhenya, who was then a Nieman fellow, gave a talk in which she said that if the KGB is not destroyed, the Soviet regime will return, just in a different form. I listened to her and thought, of course she\u2019s wrong, it\u2019s her bias speaking. Now, I must admit she was right and I was wrong.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

CY: Have things actually returned to the way they used to be? Are they just as bad?<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>No, of course not. What we have right now is not the Soviet Union. The problem is, chekists<\/i> are control freaks, and they gradually try to bring everything under their control. Hence the curbs on the media. That\u2019s why in June 2017 I had to shut down our print edition. We couldn\u2019t make any money; no advertising, no sales, they choked off everything. Print subscribers were asking us to send the magazine in a brown paper envelope so that the concierge could not see that they were getting an opposition magazine. We\u2019re not censored, but right now we exist in a half-dead state on the newtimes.ru website.<\/span><\/p>\n

CY: You were also hit with a massive fine in late 2018, supposedly for failing to report foreign funding \u2026<\/b><\/p>\n

YA: <\/b>Yes, but we raised that money in 96 hours. We were fined 22,240,000 rubles, I talked about it on the Dozhd web channel, and 18,000 people donated money. People in Russia will respond when someone is really in trouble. We are, after all, a country of survivors, a country of zeks<\/i>. So when we see that the state, this big pack of wolves, is attacking one person, people will rally to that person\u2019s defense. This happened with New Times, and with journalist Ivan Golunov in May-June 2019 [when the police tried to frame him for drug possession]; it happened with the young activist Yegor Zhukov in August-September 2019 [after he was charged with inciting riots]. This is very important: Russia now has a civil society that can, in moments of crisis, come together, fight back and protect its own. But so far, it doesn\u2019t have the strength or the know-how to do this on a regular basis. As soon as the civil society in Russia learns to not just rise up from time to time but stand constantly and defend itself against this KGB regime, that\u2019s when we will win. And we will absolutely win. Believe me.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Cathy Young<\/strong> is a contributor to <\/em>Reason magazine and an associate editor for Arc Digital. Born in the Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States in 1980 and is the author of <\/em>Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood.<\/span><\/p>\n

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A Brave Jewish Voice in Putin\u2019s Russia Cathy Young Yevgenia Albats was called \u2018kikeface\u2019 as a kid in the Soviet Union and went on to become an intrepid reporter in Moscow. Visiting the U.S. recently, she spoke with Tablet about the state of Russian politics and what it\u2019s like for Jews there today. Boris Nemtsov’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76079"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76079"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76097,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76079\/revisions\/76097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}