The comfortable way to talk about the Russian state’s antisemitism is to treat it as a series of accidents. A foreign minister blurts out something monstrous on Italian television; a spokeswoman invents Israeli mercenaries on a battlefield; a ministry moves to expel a Jewish charity. Each episode is filed under embarrassment — a slip, a gaffe, an isolated lapse of a regime otherwise busy with other crimes. I want to argue that this reading is not merely too kind but diagnostically wrong. These are not accidents. They are the surfacing of a single structural attribute, and that attribute is one of the most reliable signs we possess that a fascism has fully crystallized. As Russian power hardens into one of the most obscurantist forms the century has seen, it acquires antisemitism the way the most rabid regimes of the last century acquired it — not as a flaw but as a working part. The once-isolated moves are merging into a coordinated whole. To see it clearly is to stop asking why does this keep happening and start reading it as a symptom that tells you exactly how far the disease has progressed.
An attribute, not an accident
Lay the recent moves side by side and the pattern stops looking like a sequence of misfortunes. In 2022 the Justice Ministry demanded that the Jewish Agency — Sokhnut, the body that for decades organized Jewish emigration — shut down its Russian operations. Jewish organizations were warned they might be branded “undesirable” or “foreign agents,” the same administrative weaponry the state turns on anything it means to strangle. Deputies in the State Duma began voicing antisemitic statements that a few years earlier would have been career-ending. None of this is improvisation. It is a direction of travel, and the direction is the point. What had been dormant in the system is reawakening, and it is reawakening in a recognizable shape, because it has been seen before.
This is the first thing to grasp: a crystallizing fascism does not invent its antisemitism from nothing. It reaches into a cultural reservoir that was always there, lowers the threshold of shame, and lets what was latent become official. The individual episodes matter less than their convergence. When the expulsion of a charity, the legal threats against communities, and the loosening tongues of legislators all point the same way within a single span of months, you are no longer looking at coincidence. You are watching an attribute assemble itself in real time.
Fascism needs an internal enemy
To understand why this happens with such regularity, you have to understand what a fascist regime runs on. It runs on hatred, and hatred requires an object — a personified, internal enemy around whom the nation can be consolidated. Call it negative consolidation: a people welded together not by what it loves but by what it has been taught to fear and despise. In wartime the demand for such an enemy becomes acute, because the leader must be the indispensable shield against a threat that is always supposedly within the gates.
The trouble, for the regime, is that the convenient enemies get used up. The dissidents, the “foreign agents,” the named internal traitors — these have, in the main, emigrated. The people most loudly denounced as enemies of the state have physically left the country. So the machine, still hungry, pivots toward whatever target remains visibly present. And here it does something self-defeating: by persecuting a group it cannot simply expel, it begins to manufacture the very threat it claims to be preventing. Persecution falls on people who are not going anywhere, and on their children, programming future grievance and future violence into the society. The regime that warns of internal enemies ends by producing them.
The deepest point lies underneath even this, and it is the one most people refuse to believe. The hatred does not need a real object at all. Xenophobia and antisemitism have no reliable correlation with the actual size of the targeted group; they are cultural artifacts that can run at full power against a target that is barely present, or absent entirely. The proof is brutally simple. In the North Caucasus there have been antisemitic mobilizations — in one case a mob storming an airport in Makhachkala hunting for Jewish arrivals — in republics where the census records essentially no Jews at all. Across the wider world, countries with virtually no Jewish population, such as Iraq and Yemen, sit at the top of global antisemitism rankings. The intensity of the hatred and the number of available victims are simply unrelated. History supplies an even purer case in the Cagots of France and Spain, a group persecuted and segregated for some eight centuries though they were ordinary Catholics, indistinguishable from their neighbours in every respect that should have mattered. Invent an enemy, ascribe to it an imaginary otherness, and the entire machinery of exclusion engages — no real difference required.
The archaic mind and the archetypal Other
If the object can be imaginary, then the explanation cannot lie in anything the targeted group actually does. It lies in the structure of a certain kind of mind. Antisemitism springs less from any single cause than from what we might call the archaic, “cave” type of consciousness — the mentality that needs an enemy-Other in order to gather the tribe into a pack against an outsider. This is older than ideology, older than economics, and it survives intact beneath a civilized veneer, persisting even among the educated who would be horrified to be called primitive.
Jews became the standard Other for this archaic mind for one reason above all: alone among the peoples scattered through the diaspora, they refused to assimilate, holding their identity even under the threat of death. Different in dress, in occupation, in religion, they remained legibly distinct, and so they fit the slot the archaic mind keeps open for the outsider. This is also why the prejudice has worn several different costumes across history. There is Christian antisemitism, which cast the Jew as God-killer and built the blood libel — the lurid fantasy of ritual murder. There is racial antisemitism, the doctrine that supplied the basis for the Holocaust. And there is a “new” antisemitism, fused with hostility to the Jewish state, which we will come to. The persistence of the form beneath the changing content is precisely what marks it as archaic rather than reasoned.
That this consciousness hides behind respectability is one of its most dangerous features. Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together is, on its surface, a sober historical study; beneath that surface runs the old current of “the Jews are to blame,” dressed in the manners of a civilized facade. The Christian world has not all chosen the same path here. The Vatican has publicly renounced Christian antisemitism, while the Russian Orthodox Church still preserves the cults of saints whose veneration rests on the blood libel — a medieval defamation kept alive inside a modern institution. The archaic mind, in other words, is not a relic safely behind us. It is a live setting that a culture can choose to switch off or to keep running.
The state turns openly antisemitic — late Stalinism rhymes
When this latent material is activated from the top, it stops being a private prejudice and becomes a policy. The Russian case is unusually instructive because the prejudice at the summit is not folk superstition but something closer to a professional competence.
The open phase arrived in plain sight. In a 1 May 2022 interview on Italian television, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that Hitler “had Jewish blood” and added that “the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews” — a smear with a precise and damning lineage, traceable to the Nazi governor Hans Frank. Israeli leaders responded with open condemnation, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid among them. Around the same time the spokeswoman Maria Zakharova asserted, without a shred of evidence, that Israeli mercenaries were fighting alongside nationalist battalions in Ukraine. What followed the Lavrov remark is as revealing as the remark itself. Putin apologized to Bennett — reportedly the first apology of his career, delivered in a whisper and only to Israel — yet he did not fire Lavrov. The non-firing is the tell. Inside the sealed information bubble in which these men operate, such talk is simply routine; it does not register as a disgrace, because everyone in the room speaks the same way. The apology was diplomacy; the retention was the truth.
Putin’s own antisemitism is not religious or folkish. It is a deformation acquired on the job. He served in the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, the body that in his era specialized in persecuting “refuseniks,” Hebrew teachers, and the phantom of “Zionism.” That is where a particular professional reflex was formed, and it explains why a prejudice long kept concealed now surfaces openly, especially as Israeli society turns sympathetic to Ukraine. The reflex shows in the small tells. Putin publicly claimed that Anatoly Chubais had secretly changed his name to “Moshe Izrailevich” — the exact move of the late-Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign, which “exposed” public figures by revealing their supposed “true” Jewish names.
That campaign is the historical rhyme that matters here. In 1947 Stalin launched a “Russian priority” drive — the chauvinist insistence that Russia had invented essentially everything — formalized in Shepilov’s Pravda article on “Soviet Patriotism.” The “homeland of elephants” mockery later attached to that period captures its absurdity, but the absurdity slid, as it always does, into open state antisemitism. We are watching the same mechanism re-enacted: patriotic priority-claiming, lists of patriots against traitors, treason cases against scientists, and the move against the Jewish Agency, all of a piece. And as the war stalls and Ukrainians become a less convenient target — there is, after all, a limit to how long an enemy can be sustained — antisemitism slides into the vacant role. It becomes the obligatory element of a despotism in its agony, a sign of the conflict beginning to turn inward.
One of the engines of this campaign is a myth that collapses the moment it meets arithmetic: the claim that Jews ran the Soviet terror — that they made up, say, sixty percent of the Ukrainian NKVD. The 1939 census for Soviet Ukraine records roughly twenty-three million Ukrainians, four million Russians, and one and a half million Jews; a Jewish supermajority in the security organs is not merely false but arithmetically impossible. The empire staffed its repression, as empires do, from its “core” nation; the pre-war NKVD chiefs Uspensky and Serov were not Jews. The myth survives not because it is plausible but because the archaic mind has no use for plausibility.
Genealogy and the inversion of victimhood
The present eruption has a long genealogy, and naming it correctly defends against the regime’s favourite trick. The roots of today’s war, on the account of the academician Yuri Pivovarov, lie in two national questions the Russian Empire never resolved — the Ukrainian and the Jewish. Left unsolved, both detonated after 1917 and are detonating again now. The present catastrophe is, in part, the recurrence of an old imperial wound that was bandaged but never healed.
Against that background the regime performs its signature inversion: the aggressor recasts itself as the victim. The grievance of “Russophobia” is projection in its purest form — whatever real damage is being done to Russians and to the Russian language is being done by Putin, not by the West. At a Russia-initiated session of the UN Security Council on 14 March 2023, the ambassador Vasily Nebenzya described an “anti-Russian bacchanalia” supposedly banning Russian language and books. The template is exact and historical: the Nazi claim that “Germans are oppressed everywhere,” the manufactured grievance that underwrote the Holocaust. “Russophobia,” in this usage, is antisemitism turned inside out — the persecutor wearing the persecuted’s clothes. The same essentialism shows when officials begin to speak of national virtues as a biological “genetic code,” as one regional administrator did in declaring Russian compassion innate, a formula Putin embraced. That is Nazi-style racial thinking, and it must be rejected for the same reason: peoples do not carry virtues or vices in their blood.
There is a survival lesson buried in this history, and it refutes the oldest libel of all. The claim that Jews place loyalty to their own above loyalty to their host country — and so “earned” their persecution — is simply myth. Heavily assimilated Soviet Jews contributed enormously to the science and culture of the country that scapegoated them; assimilation did not buy them safety. It never has, anywhere. Minorities are targeted because they are convenient material for negative consolidation, not because of anything they have done or failed to do. The disloyalty slander is the rationalization a society reaches for after it has already chosen its victim.
The vaccine has expired — including in the West
The most unsettling part of the diagnosis is that none of this is confined to Russia. For roughly eighty years the Holocaust functioned as a vaccine. The memory of where racial antisemitism leads conferred a kind of immunity, making open Jew-hatred unspeakable in decent society. That immunity is now wearing off, and it is wearing off in the democracies as much as in the despotisms.
Two things have weakened it. First, time: the watershed recedes, the witnesses die, the inoculation fades in the generations that never felt the disease. Second, and more insidious, the Jews now have a state, and a portion of the left has recoded that state from victim into oppressor — into a node of an imagined “white empire” rather than a refuge built by survivors. This recoding does the same work the old ideologies did: it makes hatred feel righteous. And it produces the same dangerous merger of state-level and street-level hostility that once produced Kristallnacht — official tolerance above, organized violence below. On 7 November 2024 in Amsterdam, crowds hunted, checked papers, and beat Maccabi football fans in the streets in what amounted to Europe’s first postwar mass Jewish pogrom. There followed a Hanukkah massacre of Jews in Sydney. Western multicultural states, confronted with this, have tended to misdiagnose it — tightening gun laws after a massacre, attacking the instruments rather than naming the ideology — while having earlier funded the very organizations and campaigns that incubate the hatred, and abandoning the older expectation that newcomers accept the host society’s values.
Because the new form hides inside political language, the boundary has to be drawn with precision. Criticizing the policy of an Israeli government is legitimate, like criticizing any government. But certain markers betray antisemitism wearing the mask of criticism. The slogan “from the river to the sea” is, read honestly, a new edition of the Final Solution. The denial or minimization of the October 7 attack is a marker exactly as Holocaust denial is. The Amsterdam pogrom reframed as a mere “football-fan brawl” is the lie doing its laundering in real time. And “anti-Zionism,” presented as a respectable political position, is in the end distilled antisemitism — because Zionism means only that Jews have the right to live in their historic homeland, and there is nothing in that proposition to condemn. To attack “Zionism” as such is to object not to a policy but to Jewish existence; the talk of an “American-British-Israeli Zionist conspiracy” is the old antisemitic stamp recycled, often parroted as ambient prejudice by people who could not say what is wrong with the word.
There is, finally, a duty here that the West has failed before and is failing again. In 1939 the SS St. Louis, carrying Jewish refugees, was turned away — the United States among those who refused them — and many of those sent back died in the camps. A state that could have given shelter and chose delay or refusal bears a real, secondary share of responsibility for the deaths that followed. Inaction is not innocence. To watch the vaccine expire and do nothing is to participate, at one remove, in the result.
So the conclusion stands, and it is a diagnostic rather than a lament. The appearance of antisemitism is not a moral footnote to a regime’s other crimes; it is the reliable sign that a regime has fully crystallized into fascism — that the hatred at its core has reached for the oldest and most archetypal of its Others. This is true of Russia, where the attribute is now openly assembled. It is becoming true, by the same mechanism, in places that believed themselves immune. The antidote is not complicated, only difficult: name the thing precisely. Refuse the conspiratorial “anti-Zionist” disguise. Refuse the lie that assimilation ever bought safety, or that silence is neutrality. We cannot resist what we will not name — and the first act of resistance is to call this attribute by its name, and to recognize, the moment it surfaces, exactly what it tells us has already happened.