Leonid (Leon) Gershovich
Background
The 24 February 2022 marked the beginning of a large-scale military invasion of the armed forces of the Russian Federation (RF) into Ukrainian territory. In a speech broadcast that morning, at the beginning of the invasion, on the Russian Channel 24, the President of the RF, Vladimir Putin, declared that one of the goals of the “special military operation” (as the military invasion to Ukraine is called in the official Russian discourse) was the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. In framing the aggression in these terms, the rationale for the attack and the ensuing fighting was subsumed within the historical struggle of the Allies (USSR, USA, and Great Britain) with Nazi Germany and its Axis collaborators during the Second World War. Chief among the catastrophic events which still scar the collective memory of WWII was the extermination of about 6 million Jews as part of the Nazi execution of the “final solution of the Jewish question”, a systematic genocide which has been established in Jewish historiography and memory, and is universally recognized, as the Holocaust of the Jewish people (in short – the Holocaust).
Admittedly, there are different approaches to evaluating the Holocaust and reconstructing it in research and social-public discourse whether as a uniquely Jewish tragedy or as a universal event. However, whatever approach is adopted, it is difficult to separate the historical event of mass murder (the Holocaust) from the historical terminology in which it is reconstructed and from its unique place in Jewish history. As a result, Putin’s decision to use terminology which alludes to the Great Patriotic War against the Third Reich and to the role of Jews in the enemy’s campaign to repel the invaders, whether consciously or implicitly, has linked the discourse about the Russian-Ukrainian war with a semantic field which intersects with issues of Jewishness and antisemitism.
The issue of the complex relations between the Jewish and the non-Jewish population (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Tatar, etc.) in the Russian and Ukrainian regions traces its historical roots to the Middle Ages, and they have been constantly reconfigured by historical processes and events for hundreds of years. In modern times they were affected most by the fact that most of the Ukrainian territory was part of the “Jewish Pale of Settlement” (1791–1917) under which the Jewish population was allowed to live within the Russian Empire, as well as being able to settle in western regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the twentieth century relations between the two communities were impacted by a series of major disruptions: WWI and its aftermath, the revolutions of 1917, the civil war in the former Russian Empire, the existence of an Ukrainian entity that rapidly changed its forms, the Sovietization enforced during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the division of territory between the USSR and Poland until the outbreak of WWII, the imposition of Soviet control over Western Ukraine between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1941, the German Nazi occupation during 1941–1944, post WWII Soviet rule until its disintegration, and the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state starting from 1991. Since then, relations between Jews and non-Jews have been further influenced by internal political, geopolitical, and cultural processes, as well as by shifts in generational attitudes to and perceptions of contemporary history occurring in both Ukraine and Russia. All these have left their mark.
The Russia-Ukraine war stems from and is affected by a cluster of political, geo-strategic, cultural and even meta-historical factors and variables, including the political system and societal values of the state conducting the fighting, which in turn influence each other. The war does not explicitly revolve around the Jewish question. Jews live as citizens with equal rights (at least according to the law) both in Ukraine and in the RF, they serve in the armies of both countries, and are found within their economic and cultural elites. In both countries, antisemitism is prohibited and punished by law. Still, it seems that the Jewish question, as well as antisemitic elements (albeit in their latent form), are present, if not as the motives of the war, then in the discourse in which it is framed, both implicitly at the level of propaganda as well as on the more explicit level of public attitudes and perceptions. In the present study I want to focus on this neglected aspect of the conflict.
Another country involved in the Russian-Ukrainian war is Belarus, an independent state that maintains close political and economic ties to Russia. Belarus also has a deep historical connection to the Jewish population and to the Jewish history. In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, the territory of Belarus has been used a training ground for new Russian recruits, a territory for Russian military maneuvers, and for road access for military vehicles and supplies to the Ukrainian road system. The country played a critical role in Putin’s ability to launch the original surprise offensive in February 2022. From time to time the possibility is raised that Belarusian army will participate directly in the offensive campaign in Ukraine, although as of the time of writing this has not happened. In the media circles in Belarus that produce pro-Putin war propaganda, there is a perceptibly different narrative of the fighting in Ukraine compared to the Russian one, influenced, it seems, both by the Soviet propaganda tradition in its satellite states and by the struggle against democratic opposition following the presidential elections of August 2020. In this context, there is also a unique element in the use of antisemitic tropes as part of the anti-West propaganda effort. Therefore, it is important to examine the Belorussian contribution to the pro-Putin war effort as an influential and relevant element.
The Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to examine the place occupied by antisemitism and the Jewish question in the propaganda activities of the parties involved in the conflict both at the official state level (as reflected in the state and private media both conventional and new) and at the level of the broader public discourse as expressed in social media that can be monitored (mainly social networks).
The thesis of the research is that the Jewish question is a component of the propaganda effort of both the Russian and Ukrainian states involved in the conflict. Both assume an antisemitic stance when they invoke negative stereotypes about the Jewish collective whether constructed generically as “Jews” or the state of Israel, and when they contest the reliability and facticity of Jewish historical memory, especially with respect to its claims concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a historical event, claims which play a central role in Israel’s foundation myth. However, there is no symmetry between the parties on this issue. Whereas on the Russian and Belarusian side this denigration of the Jewish experience in Nazi-occupied Europe echoes, or is encapsulated, in the propaganda efforts in the mainstream media (either in state-owned channels or those close to the state), and echoes its views, on the Ukrainian side antisemitic tropes are associated with radical-nationalist figures on the margins of the conflict. This research hypothesis and the analysis it informs obviously requires a sound empirical and methodological foundation.
