Putin's Nazi Jews
The woman gazing adoringly at Vladimir Putin is Margarita Simonyan. She is editor-in-chief of the state-controlled news television network RT, formerly Russia Today. The Washington Post reported in April that Simonyan stated of Ukrainians, “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.”
Simonyan’s remarks unite two seemingly disparate strands of anti-Ukrainian propaganda: Ukrainians are subhuman creatures and Ukrainians are Nazis. Here she is on Russian state television in conversation with the like-minded TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, a man described by the US State Department as “perhaps the most energetic Kremlin propagandist around today.” Solovyov compares Putin’s war to the act of deworming a cat, a comparison in which Ukrainian people are represented as parasitic worms, and their elimination a medical procedure, a cleansing.
This imagery could have been lifted right out of the pages of Der Stürmer. Nazi propagandists often compared Jewish people to worms and other parasitic organisms. Here’s one illustration, from Nazi labor leader Robert Ley’s 1944 book The Pestilential Miasma of the World:
We call destructive elements in nature parasites. They are creatures who can no longer survive on their own, due to the atrophy of their vital organs, such as their lungs, digestive system, reproductive organs, or that cannot move. They are no longer able to secure their own food and digest it, and are therefore dependent on other living plants or animals. They devour their hosts. They fall like locusts on them, suck their life away, destroy them…. The Jew is such a parasite!
Solovyov used de-worming as an analogy for de-Nazification. From the outset, representatives of the regime presented the invasion of Ukraine as an effort to cleanse it of Nazis. For example, an article by Timofey Sergeytsev entitled “What should Russia do with Ukraine?” declares:
Denazification is necessary when a considerable number of population (very likely most of it) has been subjected to the Nazi regime and engaged into its agenda. That is, when the “good people — bad government” hypothesis does not apply. Recognizing this fact forms the backbone of the denazification policy and all its measures, while the fact itself constitutes its subject.
Putin and his minions use Nazi-style rhetoric against those whom they denounce as Nazis, including those alleged Nazis who are in fact Jews. These include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, members of whose family were murdered in the Holocaust.
Historian Timothy Snyder helps dispel the impression of strangeness in his discussion of Sergeytsev piece, which he calls “Russia’s genocide handbook.”
Putin’s Russian regime talks of “Nazis” …. as a rhetorical device to justify unprovoked war and genocidal policies…. The genocide handbook explains that the Russian policy of “denazification” is not directed against Nazis in the sense that the word is normally used. The handbook grants, with no hesitation, that there is no evidence that Nazism, as generally understood, is important in Ukraine. It operates within the special Russian definition of “Nazi”: a Nazi is a Ukrainian who refuses to admit being a Russian. The “Nazism” in question is “amorphous and ambivalent”; one must, for example, be able to see beneath the world of appearance and decode the affinity for Ukrainian culture or for the European Union as “Nazism”….This explains why Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, although a democratically-elected president, and a Jew with family members who fought in the Red Army and died in the Holocaust, can be called a Nazi. Zelens’kyi is a Ukrainian, and that is all that “Nazi” means.
Solovyov has explicitly affirmed that Nazis don’t have to be antisemitic. It’s sufficient to be anti-Slavic and anti-Russian. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said, during an interview shortly after Holocaust Remembrance Day, "I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews."
I argue in my book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization that dehumanized people are not only seen as subhuman animals, such as parasitic worms, but are also regarded as demonic or monstrous entities in the kind of dehumanization that leads to genocide. The image of the Nazi fills this role, especially in in Eastern Europe. “Nazi” is rhetorically powerful word for Russians because of the devastation wrought by Germany during the Second World War. More than twenty million Soviet citizens lost their lives in the war, one million in the siege of Leningrad alone (in comparison, less than half a million US citizens died in the entire war), and millions of “subhuman” Soviet prisoners perished from malnutrition, disease, or execution in German concentrations camps. Nazis are paradigmatic monsters, and to call someone a Nazi is more or less equivalent to calling them subhuman. As Ann Appelbaum comments in The Atlantic, citing Stalin’s mass extermination of Ukrainian “kulaks” during the nineteen-thirties:
Aside from the…liberal minority, most Russians have accepted the explanations the state handed them about the past and moved on. They’re not human beings; they’re kulak trash, they told themselves then. They’re not human beings; they’re Ukrainian Nazis, they tell themselves today.”
Let’s look more closely at the Nazi/Jewish nexus as it appears in Russian propaganda. Nazis are secular demons. But during the Middle Ages (and still today in some paleo-religious communities) dehumanized people were often thought to be literally demonic. Jews were the paradigmatic example. Literary scholar Moshe Lazar writes:
Branded the son of the Devil, the latter being the most absolute incarnation of Evil and destined to become the most dreaded monstrous creature, the Jew was thus cast in a mythical image from which all the other negative attributes were to be genealogically derived: liar, deceiver, agent of corruption and debauchery, treacherous, poisoner and killer, horned beast, etc. Any new verbal or visual characterization of the Devil in the following centuries is then automatically applied to the Jews.
There are several points of contact between the image of the Ukrainian painted by the Putin regime, and traditional demonizing representations of Jewish people. Like Jews, Ukrainians are accused of propagating “degenerate” values. They are said to have no true national identity (as Sergeytsev expresses it, “Ukrainianism is an artificial anti-Russian construct, which does not have any civilizational content of its own, and is a subordinate element of a foreign and alien civilization”). Even the Medieval claim that Jews (conspiring with Muslims) spread bubonic plague to destroy Christian civilization has a counterpart in Putin’s accusation that Ukrainians (conspiring with Americans and Germans) are producing biological weapons to kill Russians.
Nothing exemplifies the repurposing of anti-Jewish tropes for anti-Ukrainian propaganda more graphically than a sensational piece of Russian disinformation known as “the crucified boy.” In 2017 a report circulated in Russian media that Ukrainian soldiers crucified a three-year-old boy. "They took a child of around three years old, a little boy in his underwear and a T-shirt,” the supposed witness said, “and nailed him to a notice board like Jesus.”
This story, which was quickly debunked by Russian journalists, has a deep resonance with the charge of ritual murder that was leveled against Jews for centuries. Beginning with the murder in of a twelve-year-old boy named William, in Norwich, England, in 1144, the belief that Jews have a tradition of crucifying innocent Christian boys in mockery of Christ’s passion began to circulate, and spread eastward across Europe.
Within a century, Christian conspiracy theorists added vampirism to the mix. Jews, it was said, did not simply crucify the child. They punctured his body and drained his blood, which was mixed into matzoh dough or sacramental wine consumed at the Passover meal.
The blood libel all but disappeared in Western and Central Europe by the nineteenth century (although it was briefly revived by the Nazis later on), but it gained traction in 19th century Eastern Europe. Historian Robert Weinberg writes:
Even though the Orthodox Christian tradition did not share the Western Christian churches’ fixation on ritual murder, accusations of blood libel eventually surfaced in the Russian Empire, which had remained immune until the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century. It was then that large numbers of Jews, Catholics, and Uniates became imperial subjects as a result of the partitions of Poland, and by the early twentieth century the accusation had a secure footing among Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox believers
In 1913, a Jewish man named Mendel Beilis was put on trial for the ritual murder of thirteen-year-old Andrei Iushchinskii in Kiev. Beilis was acquitted, but the jury endorsed the prosecution’s claim that this was indeed a case of Jewish ritual murder. “At the time of the Beilis trial,” Weinberg says, “accusations of ritual murder had sunk deep roots in Russian and Ukrainian culture, and strengthened antisemitism on both the popular and official levels.” Deep indeed. As recently as 2005 nineteen members of the Russian parliament delivered a petition with five hundred signatures to the prosecutor general’s office, accusing Jews of (among other things), ritual murder. And even more recently in 2017 a representative of the Russian Orthodox church announced that the church will re-assess the murder of Tsar Nicholas and his family (a case reopened seven years earlier at Putin’s behest) because of suspicions that this was actually a Jewish blood sacrifice—a claim dating back to 1920. A member of the committee that Putin had earlier tasked with the investigation added that they too would be looking into the possibility that it was Jews that ritually murdered the Romanovs, rather than, as historians believe and the evidence indicates, a Bolshevik firing squad.
I emphasize these facts to make the point that for many Russians the notion that Jews ceremonially kill Christian children is not some time-worn fact about the history of antisemitism, something remote from the modern world. It is very much alive in the Russian culture and consciousness. Let me be clear: I am not saying that most Russians are antisemites, or that the fake news about the crucified boy was manifestly antisemitic. Rather, I am suggesting that parallels between anti-Ukrainian and antisemitic imagery are not accidental. Russian propaganda repurposes potent, culturally entrenched antisemitic themes—an unsuccessful ploy to tap old fears and hostilities in the service of the regime’s imperial ambitions.
Because Russian propaganda demonizes Ukrainians by implicitly linking them with both Nazis and Jews as paragons of evil, we should expect to find a religious component to the Kremlin’s ideology. Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church described in the New York Times as an “essential part of the nationalist ideology at the heart of the Kremlin’s expansionist designs”, and who has praised Putin’s leadership as “a miracle of God,” has placed his stamp of approval on the war. As Anthony Faiola noted in The Washington Post, Putin’s war is presented as “a holy mission, one meant to stop…the vice-ridden, atheistic, LBGT-supporting, gender-rights loving West that wants to corrupt Orthodox, conservative Christian mores.” This goes beyond the boundaries of Christian nationalism. Here is Chechen commander Apti Aladinov, a Muslim fighting for Russia, explaining that the war in Ukraine is a battle against dark Satanic forces.
My investigations into dehumanization have convinced me that dehumanizing propaganda is most effective when it is used to ignite older, historically entrenched dehumanizing representations of those deemed “other.” Skilled propagandists know this, and exploit it. The 1994 Rwanda genocide was fueled by tensions propagated by Belgian colonial rulers. In the United States, the image of Black males as violent “superpredators” draws on anti-Black propaganda that proliferated in the aftermath of the American Civil War. And, as I document in Making Monsters, Nazi dehumanization of Jewish people drew on a rich vein of medieval beliefs. The QAnon movement is fueled by the century-old fantasy of Jewish vampirism, even though most of its devotees are unaware of this pedigree. If I am right, the anti-Ukrainian propaganda pumped out by Russia is more of the same.