Antisemitism in Russia

The Russian Empire acquired large Jewish populations when it annexed territories of partitioned Poland. Imperial authorities restricted Jewish residence within the Pale of Settlement and imposed other disabilities.

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An empire makes a minority into a problem

The Russian Empire acquired large Jewish populations when it annexed territories of partitioned Poland. Imperial authorities restricted Jewish residence within the Pale of Settlement and imposed other disabilities. Older religious prejudice became a framework for state policy. Later, nationalist movements blamed Jews for upheaval, pogroms made that accusation violent, and the forged Protocols gave it a portable script. Soviet emancipation ended tsarist restrictions, but Stalin’s later campaigns restored collective suspicion in a different political language.

1791–1917

Imperial restrictions · The border moves over the people

An empire annexed Jewish communities, then restricted where their members could live.

The partitions change the map

Russia’s annexations of Polish territories brought large Jewish populations under imperial rule. These communities had not suddenly arrived from abroad; the sovereign above them had changed. The state nevertheless treated their presence as a special problem requiring separate rules.

The Pale of Settlement

The Pale of Settlement restricted most Jews to specified western territories of the empire, with exceptions for certain categories. It stretched across lands now divided among several countries. A person’s Jewish identity could determine permission to live elsewhere. This was an imperial boundary, not simply a boundary of present-day Russia.

A life governed by exceptions

Residence permits and restrictions on education and employment limited opportunities. Some Jews found routes through the rules; many remained constrained by them. Economic hardship cannot be explained by a stereotype about Jewish work. It must also be understood through the institutions that restricted ordinary choices.

1881–1903

Pogroms · A national crisis acquires a minority villain

Rumour and political hostility helped turn upheaval into attacks on Jewish neighbours.

After the assassination

Following Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, anti-Jewish attacks spread across parts of the empire. Rumours assigned Jews collective responsibility for instability. The victims were targeted for belonging to a community, not because evidence linked each of them to the assassination.

Violence needs an opening

Pogroms involved attacks on people, homes and businesses. Incitement and failures of protection helped make violence possible, although the role of authorities varied by event. Calling a pogrom spontaneous can hide how an existing climate of exclusion prepared its targets.

Kishinev, 1903

The 1903 Kishinev pogrom took place in a city now in Moldova, then part of the Russian Empire. A false ritual-murder accusation helped inflame hostility. Its international impact exposed a pattern: local violence could draw on a myth that had already travelled through religious and political cultures.

1903 and after

A conspiracy export · A fake meeting acquires real victims

The Protocols turned a fabricated conspiracy into a script that could cross languages and borders.

A document without a real meeting

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purported to reveal a Jewish plan for world domination. It was a fabrication that plagiarized earlier writing unrelated to Jews. Its early Russian publication did not make it a genuine record. There was no Jewish meeting for the text to document.

The contradiction becomes the attraction

The forgery linked banks, newspapers, revolutions and governments to one imagined Jewish controller. Opposing developments could therefore be blamed on the same enemy. Readers were offered a way to avoid the complexity of modern politics by treating everything as evidence of a hidden plan.

Exposure does not stop circulation

The text was publicly exposed as fraudulent, yet continued circulating internationally. Henry Ford’s publications and Nazi propaganda helped amplify related claims. A forgery can influence events after it is debunked when its audience values the accusation more than the evidence for it.

1948–1953

Stalinist persecution · The state invents an enemy among its own citizens

Stalin’s campaigns cast Jewish culture and professionals as signs of foreign disloyalty.

The earlier promise of equality

The revolution ended tsarist legal discrimination, and Soviet ideology formally condemned antisemitism. That break with the old regime mattered. It also makes later persecution a reversal to explain, rather than a timeless feature of every communist belief or every period of Soviet rule.

Rootless cosmopolitans

Stalin’s late campaigns targeted Jewish cultural figures and professionals through accusations of foreign attachment and disloyalty. Jewish institutions were suppressed and Jewish writers executed. The language often avoided saying simply that Jews were the enemy, while making Jewish origin central to the selection of suspects.

The Doctors’ Plot collapses

In January 1953, the regime accused a group of doctors, many Jewish, of conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. The case was fabricated. After Stalin’s death that March, the charges were repudiated. State authority had created the supposed danger; its announcement was never proof that the plot existed.

2023–present

October 7 & today · October 7 & today

Imperial exclusion and Soviet anti-Zionist conspiracy returned through state propaganda and the hunt for Jews in Dagestan.

The arrivals hall becomes a hunting ground

In late October 2023, rumours spread that Israelis were arriving in Dagestan. Mobs searched hotels, and a crowd stormed Makhachkala airport, looking for Jewish passengers and checking identities. A journey that should have ended at arrivals became a threat to people singled out as Jews.

Human Rights Watch also documented an attack on a Jewish community-centre construction site. The violence moved between travellers and local Jewish life. Being described as Israeli was only the beginning; the search was for Jewish identity itself.

The state’s old enemy acquires a new name

Imperial Russia confined Jews through law. Stalin’s campaigns later portrayed them as rootless conspirators with foreign loyalties. Soviet anti-Zionism helped turn that older outsider accusation into an apparently political judgment. Researchers trace its survival in present-day state rhetoric, including the use of Zelenskyy’s Jewish ancestry to stigmatize Ukraine.

After October 7, agitation in the North Caucasus moved from hostility to arriving Israelis into a search for Jews themselves. Likhachev argues that official incitement and solidarity rhetoric encouraged a sense that such hostility was tolerated. The airport mob was not shown to be carrying out a Kremlin order. But nationalist propaganda, inherited Soviet conspiracy and local mobilization could strengthen the same accusation: a Jew was an enemy whose identity justified exclusion, even when the language began with Israel.

Protection fails when it is needed

Human Rights Watch found that police allowed hotel inspections for Jews and initially failed to stop passport checks during the Dagestan violence. The people under threat could not rely on the authorities to draw a firm boundary around their safety.

That failure gave the mob’s accusation practical force. It was no longer only a rumour repeated in public: strangers could demand proof of identity and decide who might pass. For Jews caught in that moment, belonging depended on protection that should never have been made conditional.