How Putin The Master of Public Perception Handled The Anti-Semitism Charge

An excerpt from, “Putin’s Jews” by Konstanty Gebert, Moment Magazine, November 5, 2015:

Then there was media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky. The once-powerful oligarch (worth $1 billion-plus in 2000), owner of the then-independent NTV channel, was the first Jewish oligarch to experience President Putin’s wrath. Putin was displeased with NTV’s coverage of Russia’s war with Chechnya, the breakaway Muslim republic in the Caucasus that won its autonomy in a war in the mid-1990s.  This rupture had major ramifications within the Russian Jewish community because Gusinsky was the founder of the Russian Jewish Congress (REK), a non-Orthodox umbrella organization established in 1996 to bring together Jewish groups in Russia and to promote Jewish culture, education and welfare.

Putin wanted a Jewish organization that was loyal to him and did a masterful end-run around Gusinsky, who, according to a Jewish insider who did not want to be named, had “set up the Russian Jewish Congress for his own protection, to be able to claim anti-Semitism if he was attacked by the authorities.” In order to deprive him of this protection, the insider says, Putin set up an alternative Kremlin-affiliated Jewish structure called the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. “This worked,” he says.  In quick succession in 1999, Putin’s buddy Leviev established the new organization, which was chaired by Putin pal Abramovich. Gusinsky was arrested in 2000, stripped of most of his assets and forced into exile in the United Kingdom, where he now lives quietly.

Chabad Rabbi Berel Lazar, an American citizen and a native of Milan, Italy with no political ambitions, was quickly granted Russian citizenship and appointed chief rabbi of the new federation. “It seems to me that Putin made pragmatic calculations,” says Zvi Gitelman, a University of Michigan professor of political science and Jewish studies and a leading observer of Jewish life in Russia. “When he purged the oligarchs, it turned out that so many were Jewish that he exposed himself to being suspected of anti-Semitism, like some of his predecessors. Therefore, he found the perfect cover or fig leaf for his actions: Embrace the most ‘visibly Jewish’ Jews, those with beards, side-curls and a long tradition of cooperating with whoever was in power, and make them the ‘court Jews.’”

Berel Lazar, who declined to be interviewed for this story, first visited Moscow as a rabbinical student in 1987. Himself a child of Chabad emissaries—known as shlichim—he returned to the USSR in 1990 as one of 15 Chabad shlichim after receiving his rabbinical certification. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Jews were moving in the other direction in search of the safety and prosperity of Israel and the West. The liberalization that made their emigration possible also made possible the re-establishment of Jewish communal life, including the arrival of many foreign Jews. They came to fill the chasm left by three generations of forced Soviet assimilation and official atheism, but most found the task too hard. Lazar, who became rabbi of the synagogue in the Marina Roscha neighborhood in northern Moscow, was one of those who stayed and set to work, bringing Judaism—specifically the Chabad brand—to Russia.

It is not known exactly when Putin and Lazar first met, but Putin, who is said to be impressed by Lazar’s strict religious observance, has showered Lazar with his appreciation. First and foremost among these privileges was his blessing of Lazar as chief rabbi of the Federation. This was not as simple as it may sound, since Gusinsky’s Russian Jewish Congress already had a chief rabbi—the Siberian-born Adolf Shayevich, the spiritual leader of the Russian capital’s prestigious Moscow Choral Synagogue. Shayevich refused to step down and has alleged that Leviev offered him $240,000 to resign. To this day, there are two chief rabbis of Russia and a deep enmity between the two men. Earlier this year, Shayevich called Lazar “an agent of the Kremlin” on Russian TV. 

But Putin has found plenty of ways to express his preference for Lazar. He invited Lazar, not Shayevich, to his first State of the Nation speech in June 2000; the following year, he removed Shayevich from the government’s religious affairs council and appointed Lazar in his place. Lazar reciprocated by assuring the public that Putin’s actions against the likes of Gusinsky and Berezovsky had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, and that Russia at large was free of that scourge. In the face of growing Russian anti-Semitism in the middle of the first decade of the century, Lazar has toned down the latter point. He condemned a 2005 open letter signed by 500 nationalists, including members of the Russian Parliament, that called on Putin to ban all Jewish organizations. He also spoke out against violent attacks on Jews, including one on a Chabad rabbi in Moscow.

Lazar has consistently followed Putin’s lead. “Challenging the government is not the Jewish way,” Lazar has said. As a result of the Putin-Lazar bond, Chabad has become the dominant Jewish force in Russia, with synagogues, schools, festivals, extensive programming and representatives in nearly 50 cities across the country. It is reported to have a $60 million annual budget, much of it supplied by Putin’s Jewish allies, eclipsing all other Jewish denominations. In 2012, Lazar received what can only be considered the jewel in the crown: Putin gave him supervision of Moscow’s $50 million Jewish Museum and Center of Tolerance, which was largely funded by  Jewish oligarchs Abramovich and Vekselberg. The Lazar-Putin relationship is so tight that during the 2014 Olympics, Putin gave the 50-year-old rabbi special dispensation to enter the stadium on Shabbat without passing through the electronic gate. Again, Lazar returned the favor: A month later, he attended the victory speech Putin gave at the Kremlin after the occupation of Crimea. He was the only Jewish leader present.

Even the secularly oriented Russian Jewish Congress, which has an annual budget of $12 million and 37 local chapters, rarely strays far from Kremlin policy. Investor Mikhail Fridman (net worth $15.6 billion), founder of Alfa Group—one of Russia’s largest privately held investment groups—and another of Putin’s Jewish oligarchs, sits on its board. The group is particularly proud of its flagship Memorial Synagogue, erected in 1998 in a huge park on Moscow’s Poklonnaya Gora, which is dedicated to the Soviet victory in World War II and to those who perished in it. The park is a reminder of the breakup of the Soviet Union into independent nations, an event that remains a gaping hole in the Russian psyche, especially Putin’s. The synagogue’s presence in Poklonnaya Gora is both a testament to the Jewish contribution to the war and an expression of allegiance to the Russian state. “Of course we support the political authorities that exist,” Russian Jewish Congress president Yuri Kanner tells me. “This is halacha.” He adds: “The most important thing is that the authorities do not hinder our efforts to rebuild Jewish life.”

Author Masha Gessen says that with respect to religion—all religions—Putin is simply continuing the policies adopted under Stalin. “Religion is to be a subordinate part of the state,” she says. “Conflict, if there is any, is between independent clergy and their religious institution, but not between that institution and the state. And in the case of the war of the rabbis, from Putin’s perspective, both Shayevich and Lazar are subordinate to the state. Their personal rivalry might be intense, but it’s politically insignificant.”