Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday used antisemitic rhetoric during his lengthy end-of-year press conference, accusing people including “ethnic Jews” of tearing apart the Russian Orthodox Church.
During the press conference, Putin was asked about punitive measures some European countries have taken against the Russian Orthodox Church in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine over the church’s close relationship with Putin’s regime. The Council of Europe recently labeled the church a propaganda tool of the Kremlin, and several European countries have expelled church officials due to security concerns.
“These people that are attacking the church, they are not atheists,” said Putin. “They are absolutely faithless people, Godless people. Well, ethnically, many of them are Jews, but you haven’t seen them visit any synagogue.”
After adding that the alleged opponents of the church were also neither Orthodox Christian nor Muslim, he added, “These are people without kin or memory, with no roots. They don’t cherish what we cherish and the majority of the Ukrainian people cherish as well.”
Critics of Putin decried the statement as antisemitic, noting parallels to Soviet state antisemitism under Josef Stalin, when the Kremlin persecuted Jews and accused them of being “rootless cosmopolitans.”
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, warned that Putin’s characterization of Jews in this way could have dangerous consequences.
“This is just one example of his regime’s explicit and virulent antisemitism, which has intensified following his 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the 2023 events of October 7th,” Goldschmidt said. “This is all reminiscent of Stalin’s “Fight against Cosmopolitanism” and the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1948–53, the brutal antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union, resulting in the arrest and killing of much of the Soviet Jewish leadership in the Soviet Union.”
“We cannot emphasize enough the dangerous effect of such statements in a semi-totalitarian society,” Goldschmidt continued.
“As a representative of Jewish communities across Europe, and someone who was forced to flee my home and community in Moscow, I call on Europe and the free world to unequivocally condemn President Putin’s dangerous propaganda before it spreads further,” said Goldschmidt, who in 2022 left Russia and quit as chief rabbi of Moscow due to his refusal to endorse the invasion.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been widely criticized by international watchdogs for its close relationship with the Russian government. The Council of Europe recently labeled the church a propaganda tool of the Kremlin, and several European countries have expelled church officials due to security concerns.
Putin and his
deputies have employed antisemitic rhetoric in their arguments for their invasion of Ukraine. Although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish, Putin has claimed that Ukraine is led by a “neo-Nazi regime.”
Russia’s Jewish population has
decreased steeply since the invasion of Ukraine and during the decade leading up to it. In the Russian census of 2021, some 83,000 people identified as Jewish. The previous census, in 2010, showed about 160,000 Jews living in Russia, and an estimated 150,000 Jews were still living there in 2021, the year before the invasion.
Putin’s latest bout of antisemitic rhetoric came during his traditional year-end question-and-answer session — largely a televised show, and a rare setting in which Putin is put on the spot with some uncomfortable questions. The 72-year-old Kremlin leader spoke for just under four and a half hours on Thursday.
And it is my fault to have been to fast without reading the presentation. Sorry.
