Anti-Semitism No Longer at Center of Russian Nationalism, Verkhovsky Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, Sept. 11 – Anti-Semitism, long a feature of Russian nationalism, has not disappeared; but it has become less central to that segment of Russian politics, largely displaced by hatred of foreigners, on the one hand, and moves against nationalist groups by the state which have made those remaining more cautious, on the other, Aleksandr Verkhovsky says.

At the end of Soviet times, the longtime SOVA expert on extremism says, “it was almost impossible to find a Russian nationalist who was not anti-Semitic.” Indeed, it was so central to most of them that it wasn’t given much attention as many assumed “there was no point in talking about the obvious” (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/09/11/antisemitizm-ot-rassveta-do-zakata).

In the first half of the 1990s, as the Levada Center documented, “mass anti-Semitism grew;” and nationalists took advantage of that. “But since the middle of that decade, openly anti-Semitic sentiment in the population became less widespread and intense,” and nationalists no longer saw it as something that helped them.

According to Verkhovskky, “this was probably the case because the population adapted to the changes” brought on by the end of the Soviet system; and “no anti-Semitic agitation, which was ten massive and completely unpunished could reverse this trend.” But after 1993, Russian nationalists no longer expected to win over a majority.

By the early 2000s, earlier Russian nationalist organizations had weakened and were displaced by Nazi skinheads, who remained overwhelmingly anti-Semitic but focused instead “not on the Jews but on peoples from the Caucasus and then on migrants from Central Asia.”

            Since 2007, as SOVA Center data show, “the proportion of Jews among victims of hate crimes has always been below five percent,” Verkhovsky continues. “There have been almost no murders of Jews,” but there have been more acts of vandalism against Jewish institutions, both still horrific and more than the share of the Jewish population.

            He says that “since 2014, the movement of Russian nationalists has been plunged into a deep crisis caused by differences towards the events in Ukraine and began to degrade quickly” as a distinc force. “But it did not disappear, and its anti-Semitism did not disappear within it.” However, anti-Semitism was less prominent among Russian nationalists.

            “A new catalyst for anti-Semitic sentiment was represented by the outbreak of the war in Gaza after October 2023,” Verkhovsky says, but not so much because of the conflict itself but rather because of “the change in Soviet government policy” toward the state of Israel.

“For the first time in the post-Soviet decades, Russian policy in the region has ceased to be neutral,” the SOVA analyst says. “The Kremlin unequivocally condemned the operations in Gaza and later supported Iran. This was accompanied by a sharp increase in anti-Israeli rhetoric, which was carefully controlled lest that provoke” popular anti-Semitism.

            Russian nationalists loyal to the Kremlin like the Russian Community generally avoided anti-Semitic messaging in their propaganda; but those who saw themselves as opposed to the Russian leadership were more inclined to cross the line from opposition to Israeli actions to a broader anti-Semitism.

            The latter,  however, were subject to repression by the Putin regime and no longer set the weather for Russian nationalism. That could change if anti-Semitism becomes more influential on a cultural level in the increasingly Russian Orthodox-dominated portion of Russian nationalism, Verkhovsky concludes.