New York Times News Service, August 3rd, 1998:
In Russia, suggestions of a cultural change for
the better
By William Safire
MOSCOW - I am not Yevgeny Primakov's favorite columnist. In
a recent interview with my New York Times colleagues, Russia's
foreign minister brandished a piece I wrote about his scheme to sell
missiles to Cyprus - thereby to ignite a war between Greece and
Turkey - and characterized it as "glupo." Although his interpreter
gentled that down to "unwise," the Russian word means "stupid."
The underlying reason for his irritation is probably a
biographical aside I filed last year about his name: Primakov is the
Ukrainian word for "stepson." He adopted that name because the one he
was born with - Finkelstein - was hardly useful to a KGB espionage
agent under cover as a Pravda correspondent in the Arab Middle
East.
Curiously, the sensitivity of many other Russian politicians to
their Jewish parentage is changing. This was dramatized in the last
presidential campaign when the reformer Grigory Yavlinsky pointed to
the nutty nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and said, "Both of us are
half Jewish, but I'm the one who admits it."
The architect of the IMF bailout, Anatoly Chubais, is listed in
the "Jewish Encyclopedia of Russia." So is his archrival, Boris
Berezovsky, the equally unpopular auto-and-oil tycoon who took
Israeli citizenship five years ago and has since been appointed to
powerful Russian posts. Berezovsky warned Boris Nemtsov, the
charismatic reformer elected to be governor of Nizhny Novgorod, not
to run for president because he has "a purely genetic problem."
Nemtsov shrugs this off. "In the first stage of your entry into
politics," he told me the other day in his Moscow White House office,
"they look at your biography. But after you've been on TV a hundred
times, they forget."
Not yet 40, Nemtsov was brought to Moscow by Boris Yeltsin and now
tries to bring reform to the energy sector as deputy prime minister.
His popularity in national polls has dipped with the state of the
shaky economy, but is little affected by the public's knowledge that
he is a Jew.
When asked as far back as January by Yeltsin's chief of staff to
put down five names as choices for a replacement to Prime Minister
Victor Chernomyrdin (who did not know his head was on the block),
Nemtsov included in his list Sergei Kiriyenko, an energetic executive
in his mid-30s who had worked with him in Nizhny, who comes from a
Jewish family.
Although Chernomyrdin had earlier thought Kiriyenko to be too
young to be a deputy minister of oil and gas, Nemtsov saw him as
"smart, honest, liberal." Yeltsin, looking for a shaker-upper with no
political base, stunned the world by making Kiriyenko his prime
minister. Criticism centered on his youth and political inexperience,
and on Yeltsin's seeming impulsiveness, but not on the new man's
ethnicity.
What does this mean? Nobody can claim that Russia, home of the
pogrom and the Pale and Stalin's "anti-cosmopolitanism" campaign, has
suddenly lost its deep-rooted prejudices, or that nearly a million
Jews were glupo to abandon Russia in this decade for security and
opportunity in Israel and America.
When a bomb exploded two months ago at Moscow's Marina Roshche
synagogue, a Communist member of the Duma said ominously: "For some
reason, priority is bestowed on one nationality - Jews.
Unfortunately, I do not rule out that there may be more
explosions."
But the Communists are in decline and the more opportunistic
exploit bigotry against Muslims, usually darker-skinned Russians from
the Caucasus. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a nationalist presidential
hopeful who is trying to drain off Communist voters, put on a
skullcap and attended synagogue services to make Moscow's 300,000
Jews (few religious) feel more secure.
Resentment is directed at manipulative oligarchs like Berezovsky
who dominate the economy; few of them assert their Jewishness, though
media mogul Vladimir Gosinsky leads Russia's Jewish Congress.
In tough economic times, this general acceptance of Jews in the
full glare of Russian politics suggests a cultural change for the
better. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright could tell her
counterpart Primakov, revelation of a Jewish background is no
handicap and should be no cause for embarrassment. That augurs well
for the beleaguered Russian people.
