Contrary to common opinion, Putin’s Russia has actually been surprisingly favorable in its policies toward Russia’s Jewish community. This is directly related to the fear of Islam prevalent in Russian elites and society. While the threat of violence in the North Caucasus dictate a low profile to Russian government policies there, its policies in other areas, such as Tatarstan, are signs of its general attitudes to Muslims. In the end, current Russian policies are the opposite of Eurasianist ideas – Jews, not Muslims, appear to be the junior partner to the Orthodox Russian majority.

BACKGROUND: Recently, Russian authorities introduced the position of army rabbi in the Russian Army for the first time since 1917. This goes along with other signs of the tolerant approach toward the Jews by the authorities and a considerable part of the Russian population. While the reasons and implications of this process are many, the most important is that the Russian elite has continued to be basically Western-oriented despite all of its problems with the West. In addition, the predisposition to Israel, also related to the authorities’ benign treatment of the Jews, indicates that the Russian elite and the general public are quite concerned with Islamic extremists, possibly even more than are the majority of the European elite.

Putin’s conflict with Boris Berezovsky and the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a person with Jewish roots – created the impression that former President and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s policy had an anti-Semitic tinge. This has nevertheless not been the case, and Putin has sent signals that he actually has quite a favorable view of the Jews. This was emphasized by several symbolic actions – for example, when Putin distributed the Russian National Award to leading individuals in 2005, an event quite similar to Soviet award-giving meetings. Of course, there were no Jewish bankers at that time. But there were during the Putin era, and one of them, together with another Jew, received the award. This should indicate that attacks against oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky do not necessarily have an ethnic motivation. Moreover, these indications of the pro-Jewish slant of the Putin regime have actually increased as the regime approached its end.

In Putin’s writings, he fondly remembers the Jews he met throughout his life; and he maintains warm, personal relationships with Russia’s major rabbis. The media coverage of the life of Russian Jews is also positive and important, because it indicates the mood of the Kremlin, which controls the content of major TV programs as well as national radio. There is a stress on Russian Jews’ contributions to Russia’s cultural life. Russian national radio, for example, broadcast a positive review of a book by a Russian Jewish author. The authorities also indicate that they have no grudge against those Russian Jews who left the country en masse since the early 1990s.There is a humorous radio story about a Jewish émigré in New York who had published a book in which he exposed the machinations with oranges and other food in Leningrad. The author of the book, the manager of a food store in what was at the time Leningrad, had only one idea in mind when he decided to publish his book: he wanted to make money. At the same time, the publication of the book had some unforeseeable consequences. The information about the machinations, the story goes, helped the KGB to improve the supply of food to the city. Not only does the state hold no grudge against its Jewish émigrés, but even understands the reasons why so many Russian Jews left the country.

While discussing the Soviet period in one TV show, the commentator of a movie about the Brezhnev period recently joked about the pathological anti-Semitism of the Soviet regime. The Soviet regime’s treatment of religious Jews was especially bad and pushed them to emigrate, he said. And television broadcast a movie about  a popular Russian Jewish actor, to illustrate the point. It was stated that one of the reasons why he moved to the U.S. was because he could not live in Russia as a practicing Jew. The official blessing of what is actually a pro-Jewish policy can also be seen in Moscow, where a new modern-looking synagogue was recently erected. Nearby is a monument to Sholokh-Alekhem created with money from the “Russian gold” company.

IMPLICATIONS: While the Putin/Medvedev regime increasingly demonstrates a benevolent approach to Russian Jews, the situation is quite different concerning Russian Muslims. It is true that officials continue to be rather charitable to Ramzan Kadyrov, a Russian viceroy of a sort in Chechnya, who recently met with newly elected Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Still, this benevolent approach to Kadyrov and, implicitly, the Chechens, is an exception, in turn caused by the fear of a new wave of violence in Chechnya and the spread of jihadism from Chechnya and the North Caucasus. At the same time, in places where the authorities are not afraid of a violent reaction, they steadily increase their pressure on the Muslim population. Continuous arrests of Muslims accused of memberships in what Russian authorities regard as extremist organizations, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, have taken place. The authorities continue to update the list of literature that is defined as extremist, the possession of which is considered a serious crime. The vast majority of books listed deal with Islam. Russian authorities continue to persecute even the readers of Said Nursi, the Turkish theologist whose writing is a reaction to what he regarded as the anti-Islamic policies of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Even Turkish authorities have not regarded Nursi’s work as subversive. Nursi’s followers, the Fethullah Gülen movement, were recently banned from Russia.

Even the most moderate Muslim politicians or intellectuals whom Moscow could suspect of being troublemakers can expect rough treatment. This was the case with Rafael Khakimov, a prominent Tatar intellectual and long-time advisor to Tatarstan’s president Mintimer Shamiev. Khakimov is a proponent of Euro­-Islam, the theory that regards Islam as a legitimate part of European culture whose values are seen as quite similar to those of the modern West. Khakimov also supported a confederation with Russia for Tatarstan, or at least, the broadest autonomy inside the Russian Federation. His removal was seen by some Russian observers as the “end of an epoch” and a continuous relentless drive to strengthen “the verticals of power,” i.e., the growth of centralization and the corresponding increase in power of Russian nationalism, some of whose representatives, possibly for the first time in Russian history, see Muslims as more of a threat for Russians than Jews.

CONCLUSIONS: There are several reasons for the softening of the Russian position toward Jews. To begin with, the emerging Russian middle class and most of the Russian elite continue to be Western-oriented and integrated in the Western social-economic order, much more so than during the Yeltsin era. The acceptance of the notion of moneymaking as a legitimate enterprise has also influenced the Russian public, who relates these activities with Jews and the West. Some Russian Jews have become quite nationalistic, such as Vladimir Solovev, a popular Jewish TV commentator who has strong Russian nationalist messages in his comments. But even more so, the acceptance of Jews as a legitimate part of Russian society is due to Russians’ increasing concern about Islamic pressure. Recent indirect evidence of this can be seen in Russia’s reaction to America’s problems in Afghanistan. One could have assumed that the Russian mass media would gloat; however they ignore the subject, perhaps because the North Caucasian Islamist website Kavkaz-Center publishes glowing reports of Afghan Islamist successes. Russian authorities have even stated that Russia could help NATO troops in Afghanistan. Moreover, Russia and Israel recently ended a mutual visa requirement between the two countries. Nothing of this sort exists between Russia and Arab or Muslim countries.

By contrast, the growing pressure on the Muslim community in Russia in contrast to the rather benign treatment of the Jewish community, is also telling. All of this indicates that with all of their problems with the West, Russians, even the general Russian public, continue to be basically Western-oriented and see the major problems for Russia as coming from the East, with the threat of Islam both inside and outside the Russian Federation in particular seen as the major concern. It also indicates the peculiar changes in ethno-social dynamics and ideology. The Eurasianists’ ideas of a “symbiosis” of Orthodox Russians and Muslims is increasingly marginalized, and replaced either by Russo-centric Russian nationalism or a new, peculiar, “Eurasianism,” in which the Jews replace Muslims as loyal "younger” brothers of the Orthodox Russians. On this scale, this is a truly novel phenomenon.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dmitry Shlapentokh is Associate Professor of History, Indiana University, South Bend.