Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 3 – The climate of
fear and hatred that Vladimir Putin has created in Russia which first was
directed against Chechens and then immigrants and gays, is now to the surprise
of no one familiar with Russian history and with the propensity of those in any
country who hate to find additional objects for their hatred being directed at
Jews.
In an article entitled “Beat the
Jews and Save Russia” on colta.ru, Svetlana Reiter tells the story of two women
in St. Petersburg, one a Jew and one someone only connected with Jewish
activities, and the rising tide of anti-Semitism they and others now face from
some within the population and worse from some within the police (colta.ru/articles/society/6475).
Leokadiya
Frenkel, program coordinator at the Jewish Community Center in the northern
capital, describes her experiences while teaching Russian to migrant workers
from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, an action that Russians and especially
Russian nationalists might be expected to approve of.
But that is far from the case. She reports
that a group calling itself “Morality” on the VKontakte social network attacked
her efforts, posting 161 pictures of her and denouncing the notion that “a
Jew-liberal social group should be going to meetings and teqching ‘black’
children the Russian language.”
The group, which has more than 4,000
followers, is “absolutely fascist and anti-Semitic,” Frenkel says. “They
constantly write that migrants commit a large portion of crimes in Russia, that
‘black’ children go into our schools and defile out children, that the children
of migrants are wild beasts” and so on.
When the site learned that “a Jewish
woman was teaching immigrants,” its leaders concluded that they were dealing
with what in their lights was “pure evil.” They posted information not only
about her but about her son and her husband, and they declared that neither
Jews nor immigrants “have a place in our society.”
Mikhail Kuzmin, 28, the founder of
the “Morality” site, is a graduate of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian
Academy of Law and a member of the local section of the Great Russia party. He
has attracted attention in the past for attacking lesbian and gay activists
with his fists.
In one of the pictures posted on the
site, Frenkel says, Kuzmin is shown in a policeman’s uniform, although she said
that she doesn’t know whether he really is one. Another photograph shows him
standing alongside notoriously obscurantist Duma deputy Milonov.
“The most terrible thing, of course,”
she continues, is that Kuzmin “not only is operating in social networks. He is
walking around the streets. I complained to the VKontakte administration, but
they responded that ‘if you don’t like this group, then don’t look at its
materials. We close only those groups which directly threaten someone’s life.”
Frenkel continues: “It is difficult for
me to say whether people from ‘Morality’ threaten my life.” But among its
thousands of followers, it is not impossible to imagine that there are some who
would. Moreover, she says, “I am really afraid for my family” given “the insane
level of aggression” in Russian society.
She adds that her center does not
have any guns to defend itself. “The only thing” she says she can do is to talk
about this group in public and hope that shining a bright light on this evil
will cause others to be as appalled as she clearly is.
The second person with whom Reiter
spoke is Tamriko Apakidze, an ethnic Georgian who used to teach at the Petersburg
Institute of Judaism before deciding that the situation there was too
uncomfortable and moving to Germany. She
recounts how she found herself in a police station because she had carried
signs declaring “Crimea is Ukraine” and “Make Love Not War.”
Initially she was intrigued having
never been detained before. But when the police took her documents and refused
to allow her to call anyone, she says she realized that this was no laughing
matter. Moreover, her interrogator became angry when she said that she worked
at the Institute of Judaism.
He began to “ask what I taught there
and how long I had worked there.” She
says she was then released, handed a protocol and told to wait for notification
of her court date. But the next day, she
found out that this was hardly the end of it. It turned out that sitting near
her at the police station was Kuzmin of “Morality” and that he shared all this
with his VKontakte group.
Although she had said that she was a
Georgia, Apakidze reports, her work at the Institute of Judaism was enough for
him. He posted some 25 pictures of her, a screenshot of the institute itself,
along a photograph of himself in a Nazi uniform with the words that she wasn’t
a homosexual but she supports them.
Apakidze’s husband wrote Kuzmin, denounced
him as a Nazi and demanded that he remove all the picture of her, she says. To
that Kuzmin responded: “I am not a Nazi because all Nazis are kikes.” There was
no reason to continue the discussion, she adds, but she indicates that she never
expected to encounter anything like that in her life.
She and her spouse asked VKontakte
to take down the site. But it didn’t,
and she became “very afraid,” Apakidze says, especially when she saw the photograph
of the institute. Indeed, she acknowledges, all this made her paranoid
especially since it gave rise to “the suspicion that Kuzmin is working in
connection with the police.”
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