At a time of political crisis and uncertainty for Jews in the main Anglophone democracies, Adam J Sacks suggests that Western Diaspora communities examine the lessons from the history of the Russophone Jews of the former Soviet Union. Sacks argues that these Russophone Jews developed their own internal solidarity and a cohesive, non-judgemental community that knows how to defend itself, thus offering a lesson to other Diaspora communities uncertain of their future.
The Critical Third Pillar
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Anglophone Jewish communities were able to assist with material aid. Today, with the crisis of the liberal world, it is Russophone Jewry that can furnish mental succour and psychological aid to their previous benefactors.
In recent years, many assumptions about living a free, secure and proud Jewish life in the 21st century have been undermined, especially in places where one might least have expected it. The Anglophone West, long an oasis of relative stability and acceptance, is now marked by turbulence, even hostility from across the political spectrum to Jews and the plight of Israel. Those open societies based on fair play are increasingly imbued with cynicism and corruption, and even the spectre of personal, authoritarian rule. The Anglophone world is no longer a state of exception in Jewish life.
Now Anglophone Jews can learn from the often overlooked, critical third pillar of Global Jewry, the Russophone. With a global population well over two million, these Jews constitute the most significant sub-group, after the Anglophone and the Hebrew conversant. The history of Russophone Jews, those living in the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) and recently emigrated, has forged an experience that is expert at, and tragically trained in, navigating what it means to be labelled an internal enemy of the state and society. Russophone Jews know what it means to completely lose a comfortable world, however imperfect it was. This experience has created a fount of civilisational tenacity, a guide to coping with turbulent times. I would posit that Russophone Jews are the last Jewish community without illusions. These are Jews who possess the most distilled forms of resilience and indomitability. Their history, their experience of recurring crises, has forged four fundamental lessons for contemporary Jewish life:
- Maintain a healthy skepticism to all ideologies, and especially to the state itself. Accordingly, do not let denominational or political boundaries define you. Flexible solidarity within your own community should always take precedence.
- Cultivate the inner life, make the private world one of warmth, family recipes, deeply absorbing books, music, and film. Even if you do not practice religious laws and customs, appreciate that some others do – and that you benefit from your observing of their observance.
- Practice and train for self-defence, do not wait for others to do it for you. Be ready to move, and far, without much notice. To that end, learn another language, or maybe even three – it keeps the brain sharp.
- Regardless of politics in Israel, do not lose sight of the underlying principle of hope: that somewhere things can get better for Jews. Never let any conflict around Israel interfere with this principle of hope.
The Scars of History
Though it is a generation since the crises of the 1990s and with the war generation passing on, Russophone Jewry’s scars and lessons endure. Gathering together and sitting in dialogue has proven a most effective way of processing these experiences. For that reason, the ‘Limmud’ model of Jewish learning thrives in the post-Soviet space, attracting the largest number of participants after its original home in the United Kingdom. The most recent such conference Limmud Baltics 2025: “Babylon” in Vilnius, Lithuania put these lessons on display. As several participants related, the Limmud approach means to them ‘friendship,’ ‘family,’ ‘holiday,’ ‘communication,’ even ‘love’. In contrast this Limmud model has not taken off in the United States.
Startling at Limmud “Babylon” was for how many of the participants, their Jewish Red Army veteran grandparent (or great-grandparent) was the sole survivor in the family. For others, family members managed to live only via prompt evacuation, desperate last-minute flights, usually a part of war-critical state transports, deep into the then Soviet Union. World War II touched every single family directly. Indeed, in a wider sense the entirety of Ashkenazi Soviet Jewry may be viewed as second and third generation Holocaust survivors. The traces these experiences left on their grandchildren were not just emotional, invisible scars. When I spoke to Limmud organiser Misha Beshkin, he spoke of the actual wounds on his grandfather’s body, testimony to a victory that once seemed impossible.
The 1990s brought economic and social catastrophe. Almost overnight most professional positions, aligned with the state, simply vanished. That change disproportionately affected former Soviet Jews as they were the country’s most educated nationality. The Jewish children of Red Army veterans, who had often braved near-institutionalised discrimination to obtain advanced degrees, had to forage economically. Respected architects became newspaper vendors at the entrance to metro stations. Chemists turned to making and selling fertiliser from home. Some Jewish middle-class professionals were left with little option than to turn to the fringes of organised crime for their daily bread. There was banditry, widespread unemployment, abuse, and epidemics. Streets and houses fell into disrepair. For a brief time, the crude death rate rose 20 per cent, putting it above most countries in Africa. For at least a few brief years in the early 1990s, the stuff of a Hollywood apocalypse was everyday Russian reality. So the lessons forged in Soviet times were put to an even greater test after the USSR’s collapse.
A Singular, Jewish Identity
For Jewishness, the Soviet experience was a laboratory without parallel. What happens to Jewish identity in a radical atheist, one-party state which recognises people as Jews in official documents but allows no Jewish education? The answer: it produced a ferocious Jewish solidarity. ‘It was environmental,’ Misha Beshkin explained. Leon Gershkovich, the resident historian at Limmud “Babylon”, clarified, this paradox of resilience: ‘they held steadfastly onto Jewishness, while also being entirely detached from its content.’ They possessed a strong sense of being Jewish, but had no connection to the traditional notions of Jewishness. All core elements were disengaged, except for that most fundamental, the irrevocable, existential status f simply being Jewish. That approach represents a particular, and novel, form of Communist and post-Communist Jewishness beyond language, religion, or even any formal concept of Judaism at all. One might even describe it as the transformation of a state minority group into a new peoplehood altogether, an ethnic identity, forged, in part, in opposition to bureaucratic stigmatisation.
Consequently, Russophone Jews today largely lack the denominational or ideological divisions common elsewhere. They enjoy a people’s solidarity without factionalism. Even in the decades since their arrival in the West, Russophone Jewish emigrants have not gone down the road already paved of gathering around a denominationally-defined synagogue in a specific residential cluster. That German-Jewish Reform model (later adopted by most Tsarist Jewish immigrants) derives from an essentially Protestant idea of religious confession as a private exercise of spiritual feeling. Similarly, these protestant-influenced parts of Reform Judaism strip religious practice of almost all ritual. They leave the pondering of sacred texts and concepts entirely to the personal conscience of the individual.
That is in part why, as Misha Beshkin explained, the synagogue Russophone Jews do not go to is most often Orthodox. The rabbi that takes it upon himself to fulfil all of the complex dictates of halacha (Jewish law), is understood as something more like a seeking mystic. This model of a religious leader is greatly influenced by Orthodox Christianity. In Orthodox Christian practice, clergy are more than civic officiants, they are practicing holy men on the search for theosis, a form of commune with the divine. The volunteer organiser for Limmud “Babylon”, Libuja, explained that this Russophone Jewish approach to religion that venerates the Orthodox is a statement of survival against the past, it says ‘you tried but you could not suppress this.’
Another instructive contrast is that for many Anglophone Jews civic liberalism is a core personal value – in a sense their ‘real’ religion. For these Anglophone Jews it is an obvious way to organise their country’s political life, and to maintain and defend pluralism. Not so for Russophone Jews. Leon Gershkovich offered that liberalism in its modern form, or what some call ‘cultural neo-liberalism,’ seems to Russophone Jews to contradict cultural authenticity – something that was long denied to Soviet Jews.
An Alternative to ‘White Privilege’ and ‘Anti-Zionism’
In an indication of how debates in one part of the Jewish world do not transfer to others, Russophone Jews find discussions in the Anglophone world about ‘white privilege’ baffling. Whenever they depart from Eastern Europe, where the idea is largely irrelevant, westwards they are forced to grapple with this concept. In the Anglophone world with its deep history of slavery and colonialism of the African and Asian world it makes sense.
However, the FSU, a place of deep prejudices and state sponsored discrimination does not fit this framework. Misha Beshkin argues that Russophone Jews cannot wrap their heads around the notion of ‘white privilege.’ After all Soviet Jews, along with their Eastern Slavic neighbours were not ‘white’ in the American sense. Indeed, they suffered enslavement and oppression by the ‘white’ Germans during World War II. Soviet Jews, although highly educated, suffered a significant anti-humane social devaluation during post-war state-sponsored antisemitism. According to Misha Beshkin, ‘I would not call such a position a privilege.’
Russophone Jews also have a unique relationship to the Jewish state. Perhaps no other Jewish community paid such a high price for the establishment of the state. Though the USSR was the first country to recognise Israel de jure, as well as to organise the shipment of arms, it then turned savagely against the new state when it became clear, Israel would not end up in its bloc. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union militarily supported Israel’s adversaries. From the early 1950s onward, the Soviets pioneered an ‘Anti-Zionist’ campaign, which sowed the seeds of the anti-Israel rhetoric we hear today. Official ‘Anti-Zionism’ stigmatised Soviet Jews for many decades. More than any insinuation of ‘dual loyalty’, a charge levelled against Jews in many other countries, it propagated outright demonisation via an alleged global conspiracy. It asserted Zionism as a malevolent force of world control, and the fount of all evil.
Yet those many years of state antisemitic, ‘Anti-Zionist’ propaganda was never internalised by Russophone Jews, particularly the younger generation. This stands in marked contrast to the United States where some younger Jews have soured on Israel. Kolya, an educator and younger veteran of several youth initiatives in Russia, such as Moishe House and Hillel, estimates that less than one per cent of young Russophone Jews hold anti-Israel views. Others I asked in the Baltic republics could not recall of ever hearing of even a single instance of such views. A featured musical acts at this past Limmud “Babylon”, Vladi Blayberg is more than just Israel-friendly, he actually serves as an official performer of the anthem of the IDF.
The historical trajectory of antisemitism is also different for Russophone Jews. Whether in disguised form or not, antisemitism never receded from public discourse and propaganda in the FSU as it did in the Anglophone world. Unlike tight-lipped Protestant Anglophone culture, there is no premium placed there on restraint on expression of prejudice or hiding one’s true feelings. The Russophone Jewish community never enjoyed a time-out from antisemitism during which it could forget their hard-won survival skills. Unlike the British slogan ‘no place for antisemitism,’ the reality for Russophone Jews is that their countries always have a place for antisemitism.
History will not leave Russophone Jews alone in their current home in the FSU. Not only Gaza, but the Ukraine war, naturally hit close to home. October 7 and its aftermath are heart breaking, but Ukraine is frighteningly existential. Furthermore, Ukraine is not a case of a continuing, century-long, ongoing conflict; this conflict is not the case of one inherited from the Tsarist Empire and the Communist era. Ukraine was for centuries the historical ‘little brother’ of Russia. Ukraine’s historical relationship to Russia was quite akin with that of Scotland to England, so just imagine the shock if England decided to attack Scotland. ‘When families start to fight, it is particularly bad’ said Libuja, a mother of three. She continued ‘I was in a state of shock for two weeks, I couldn’t move. The nuclear war nightmares of my childhood came back’.
Russophone Jews in the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) confront a particular issue in that their very ‘mother tongue’ is a point of political contention. Indeed, these countries, now in the EU, regard Russian as the language of the enemy. Although about 70 percent of Limmud “Babylon” presentations were in Russian, more than 90 percent of participants wish that from now on they could all be in English. The strange destiny of Holocaust survival accounts for the inescapable fact that Russian remains the language of intra-Jewish communication among post-Soviet Diaspora Jews.
No Time-Out from History Ever
The Baltic republics have wanted to repress their Russophone past since restoring their independence in 1991. The Russian attack on Ukraine, and their stated desire to curtail Russian influence, has resulted in measures that affect speakers of Russian, which naturally greatly affect their Jewish communities. This academic school year is to be the last for Russian language education in Latvia, and even in Jewish schools today the language is exclusively Latvian. Also in Latvia some, mostly elderly, are under threat of deportation for failing to meet residency requirements. Estonia has banned non-EU citizens, many of whom are Russophone, from voting in local elections. Citizenship regulations can also affect the connection to Israel. Latvia, for instance, restricts the ability to keep dual citizenship to those whose second passport is from other EU, EFTA, and NATO countries, along with Australia, Brazil, and New Zealand. For the moment, until there is a diplomatic agreement, that excludes Israel. ‘I see tension from the pro-Russia, Russian-speaking population and the right wing of Latvians,’ shared Julija, a financial technology project manager and the mother of a teenager. Being adequately multilingual, and the ability to ‘code switch’ between the cultural norms of Latvia and that of Russian culture, is an unavoidable necessity for Jews.
Again, unlike some Anglophone communities, Russophone Jews cannot outsource self-defence, nor be reliant totally on the state for their security. Unlike elsewhere in the FSU, but much more like in some EU countries, fascism and Nazi collaborators are viewed with ambivalence if not some degree of nostalgia or fondness, marches of SS veterans have occurred with some regularity. Symbols and insignia of the Nazi political universe are still embedded in everyday life. Some Limmud “Babylon” participants even reported such symbols on some of the unsavoury looking individuals who often loiter around community institutions. Even at the same hotel which hosted Limmud “Babylon”, security personnel observed and tracked several guests with Nazi tattoos. Radical pro-Palestinian actions also occur. Recently somebody in Riga attached beepers to the car of a known activist of a Latvian Jewish organisation ‘Jewnited.LV,’ a threatening reference to Israel’s 2024 operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon. ‘I know that I should have abilities to defend myself and my family’, Julija shared. Without public fanfare, a community security group offers training in Krav Maga and firearms. ‘First of all, I rely on myself,’ says this mother of a 17 year old, who is a Jewish model of motherhood close to that of the urban survivalist rather than the suburban soccer chauffeur. The resident Limmud historian, Leon Gershkovich also conducted a session on Krav Maga. He holds the rank of level 2 in Krav Maga and a second dan black belt in karate.
When I remarked upon the numerous differences between Russophone and Anglophone Jews, Julija put it best ‘well, it’s never too late to learn some history.’ The Russophone Jews’ lessons for cultural survival are a vital element of the modern Jewish experience. What Russophone Jews understand as self-evident is akin to a precious volume on the historical shelf of Jewish life, just waiting to be opened for its wisdom to be learned anew.
