Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionismby William Korey

Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism by William KoreyReview by: Robert O. FreedmanSlavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 470-472Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697098 .

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470 Slavic Review

gues that the fact that Russian nationalists did not call for radical political and economic reforms and thereby did not challenge the authoritarian nature of the regime made their views appealing to a political leadership determined to preserve the status quo. These two chapters also contain many factual revelations, as they bring together new archival mate- rial, the author's interviews with participants in the events, and Soviet press reports of the glasnost period. Although they are also based on a discussion of primary sources, the parts of the book on the perestroika period are less innovative in both argument and empirical data. The epilogue offers an insightful analysis of why Russian nationalist ideology, which seemed defeated by 1991, reacquired its popularity in postcommunist Russia. Brudny at- tributes it to the failure of liberal reformers to address seriously the question of the nature of postimperial Russian nation- and statehood.

The main weakness of this overall impressive scholarly account is the author's failure to discuss the historical origins of the ideas expounded by intellectuals in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and in contemporary Russia. The book gives the impression that the arguments and concepts put forward from the 1950s onwards were invented from scratch by Russian intellectuals in the wake of the Twentieth Party Congress. Given the author's stress on the importance of the substance of ideological arguments in understanding the nature of nationalist movements, the lack of interest in the historical origins of the ideas seems odd and it somewhat limits the depth of the book's analysis. In fact, there is little, if anything, original in the views of Russian nationalists in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and in today's Russia. Liberal nationalists have been largely repeating the views of the authors of the Vekhi collection (1909) and of prerevolutionary historians of the so-called statist school such as Vasilii Kliuchevskii. Those whom the author classifies as conservative and radical nationalists lavishly borrowed their arguments, from such conservative thinkers of the past as Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont'ev, and the Eurasianists as well as the ideology of the Black Hundred movement. They have also been strongly influenced by the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which a good number of Russian nationalists under discussion participated, unmasking "rootless cosmopolitans" among their university professors. The author therefore ignores a retrospective nature of contemporary Russian nationalism and does not address the question of why nationalist intellectuals have been trying to apply concepts, elaborated under entirely different cir- cumstances, to the Russia of their time. Similarly, their liberal-reformist counterparts his- torically have been unable to treat the question of Russian nationalism seriously; indeed even prerevolutionary liberals tended to view any variant of nationalism as harmful for Russia's political development. These historical legacies are still important today and their analysis is crucial for understanding the dynamics of Russian nation building in the period under discussion in the book.

VERA TOLZ University of Salford

Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism. By William Korey. Studies in Antisemitism. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. x, 236 pp. Notes. In- dex. $59.00, hard bound. $29.00, paper.

In this meticulously researched book, William Korey, one of the foremost scholars of So- viet and Russian Jewry, has done the field of Slavic studies a major service. Not only has he explored the long continuum of Russian anti-Semitism from the tsarist period to the present, he has also demonstrated the close link between anti-Semitism and the antidemocratic forces in Russia that developed in the later stages of the Gorbachev era and which continue in Boris El'tsin's Russia. He also upbraids both Mikhail Gorbachev and El'tsin for not speaking out strongly against anti-Semitism (he cites the comments of SovietJewish activist Iurii Sokol who said, "Gorbachev and El'tsin had great difficulty pronouncing the



Book Reviews 471

word 'anti-Semitism"' [202]) and contends that such reticence was politically foolish as well as being morally indefensible.

Korey begins the book with a detailed description of "Union of the Russian People," known popularly as the "Black Hundreds," a group of anti-Semites aided by the tsarist Ministry of the Interior which opposed both democratic reforms in Russia and Russian Jews. He then notes that Pamiat, which emerged as the leading anti-Semitic group in Rus- sia in 1987, not only shares the anti-Semitic and antidemocratic views of the "Black Hun- dreds," but also enjoyed a similar degree of protection from elements in both the Soviet government and El'tsin's government.

After a very useful chapter depicting the efforts of Russian and Soviet anti-Semites to link Freemasonry to Judaism, Korey spends the bulk of his book contending that the government-inspired anti-Zionism campaign in the period 1967 to 1986 laid the ground- work for the emergence of popular anti-Semitism after the Soviet government dropped its campaign of anti-Zionism. He argues that Pamiat, "an extremist expression of Russian nationalism ... was rooted in a social soil that had been nourished by rich nutrients of big- otry during 1967-1986" (125). Korey goes into detail analyzing the books and articles of such notorious anti-Semites as Trofim Kichko, Valerii Emel'ianov, and Lev Korneev and notes how the "official" Soviet anti-Semites, hiding as anti-Zionists, stooped so far as to res- urrect such blatant forgeries as the "Protocol of the Elders of Zion," asserted that Zionism was an active supporter and partner of Nazism, and even justified the pogroms against the Jews that occurred in tsarist Russia.

Korey also contends that the Soviet leaders actively supported the Arab "Zionism is Racism" resolution of 1975 at the U.N. to get an international "moral sanction" (35) for their domestic campaign against Zionism. However, an equally plausible reason might be that the declaration was seen as part of Moscow's campaign to isolate Israel and its primary backer, the United States, at a time when the U.S., following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was beginning to orchestrate the Middle East peace process that was to culminate in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979.

The latter section of Korey's book deals with the late Gorbachev and early El'tsin pe- riods (1987-1993) when officially sanctioned anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism had ended. Despite Gorbachev's efforts at glasnost, the Soviet leader never unequivocally denounced anti-Semitism, and Korey contends that Gorbachev's decision to add an outspoken anti- Semite, Valentin Rasputin, to his newly created Presidential Cabinet in 1990 was an ill- advised attempt to co-opt right-wing nationalist forces that in the end did not prevent a right-wing coup against him in August 1991. Similarly, he castigates El'tsin for not using the "bully pulpit" to condemn the anti-Semitism that had erupted in Russia in 1993 in a Pravda article that resurrected the atrocious charge of ritual killings of Christians byJews, or in urging stiffer penalties for anti-Jewish (and antidemocratic) attacks such as the one against the liberal Moscow youth newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets by Pamiat thugs (the leader of the attack was freed on probation).

While I am in agreement with Korey's basic thesis, and with the evidence he brings forth to support it, I have three minor quibbles. First, in my view Korey tends to overem- phasize the importance of the Soviet anti-Zionist committee. He also sees it as part and pa'rcel of the overall domestic anti-Zionist effort by the Soviet leadership; it might also be seen as a response to the efforts by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Israeli Prime Minis- ter Menachem Begin to convene a clearly anti-Soviet SovietJewry conference inJerusalem in March 1983 (U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.JeaneJ. Kirkpatrick was the featured speaker). Second, no mention is made of the fact that in 1991 the USSRjoined with the U.S. at the United Nations to overturn the "Zionism is Racism" resolution and this was to Gorbachev's credit. Finally, while Korey cites numerous studies to indicate a high level of anti-Semitism in Russia, and cites a large number of "nativist" anti-Semitic Russian authors who appear in the periodicals of the Russian Writers Union, other studies, including those published in Slavic Review, indicate a lesser degree of anti-Semitism. Indeed, one wonders if such political figures ofJewish parentage as Boris Nemtsov or Sergei Kirienko could have risen to high office in Russia had the level of anti-Semitism been as high as Korey suggests. To be sure, following the near collapse of the Russian economy in August 1998, communist leader



472 Slavic Review

Gennadii Ziuganov resurrected anti-Semitism as a political issue after it had seemed to dis- appear following El'tsin's confrontation with Parliament in 1993 and the subsequent ban- ning of Pamiat. Whether Ziuganov will be successful with this attempt, however, remains to be seen. In any case, Korey's book is an excellent study of Soviet and Russian anti-Semitism and should prove a useful reference as Russian politics play out in the months and years ahead.

ROBERT 0. FREEDMAN Baltimore Hebrew University

Mortal Friends, Best Enemies: German-Russian Cooperation after the Cold War. By Celeste A. Wallander. Cornell Studies in Security Affairs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xi, 229 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. Tables. $49.95, hard bound. $19.95, paper.

Celeste Wallander uses German-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War as a site for investigating whether institutions matter in world politics or states merely use their power to pursue their interests-the counterargument she identifies with structural neo- realism. She confines her investigation by arguing that international institutions only become capable of mattering when states recognize common as well as conflicting interests and when force is seen to be costly or ineffective. Under these conditions, she hypoth- esizes, international institutions will be more useful to states, the more they are uncertain about each other's intentions. International institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), or the treaty concerning Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) help to resolve uncertainty because they increase "transparency," subjecting each state's behavior to mutually agreed, unambiguous criteria for determining intent to comply with international agreements, and because they provide each state with allies on whose help the state can rely in case of misjudgments about the intentions of potential allies.

Relying mainly on interviews with senior politicians and foreign and defense officials in Germany and Russia, Wallander also takes advantage of the opportunity to assemble the public record of the range of issues in German-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War. The reader will find concise, informative presentations of the following: withdrawal of Russian forces from the former East Germany, renegotiation of the CFE to accommo- date Russian demands for larger forces in the troubled North Caucasus, Russia's relations with other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, problems of migration into both countries, NATO enlargement, international aspects of Russian economic and financial reform, and (all too briefly) Russian and German policy toward the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Comparing the interviews to the record, she concludes that her German and Russian interviewees meant what they said when they emphasized that both governments perceive "risks" rather than "threats" in the international situation. Both governments' concern for mutual risks rather than threats satisfy her criterion of common interests and the futility of force, and she concludes that in most cases, but significantly not in the post-Yugoslav crisis, international institutions have helped Germany and Russia to resolve doubts about each other's willingness and ability to follow through on international agreements that, es- pecially in Russia, are controversial in domestic politics.

Wallander has written a fine book with evidence that bears her conclusion. Even so I am not sure a committed structural neorealist (which I am not) would find anything to object to here. Given a suitable "structural" configuration of capabilities and interests, states construct international institutions in which they cooperate; given an unsuitable structural configuration, as in the former Yugoslavia, there seems to be nothing institutions can do. When institutions are helpless, both states and stateless peoples must rely on self-help, the latter at a tragic disadvantage.

Wallander consciously eschews domestic politics. Fair enough: even when domestic



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Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionismby William Korey