Putin thrives on chaos and violence. Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
Sunday’s ugly scenes at Makhachkala Airport in Russia’s Dagestan region, where a mob ran riot through the terminal and onto the runway in search of Jews disembarking from a plane from Israel, might suggest that Vladimir Putin is beginning to lose his iron grip on the Russian Federation. Videos of protesters threatening not just the public but pelting the police with missiles spread rapidly on domestic social media networks, calling to mind the chaotic violence that preceded the 1917 Revolution.
In reality, however, the Putin regime does not just tolerate but encourages violence against minorities in order to justify the state’s own wars and attempt to create a more harmonious Russian society. The Machachkala pogrom, while unplanned and perhaps even undesired, is easily rewritten to fit a narrative in which Russia is constantly under threat of invasion from the outside.
In the world of official propaganda, Russia is a flourishing “multinational” country where millions of Muslims, indigenous peoples, and even Jews live happily alongside one another under the banner of a shared Russianness. The morning after the violence in Makhachkala, Russia’s schoolchildren were treated to a mandatory patriotism lesson in preparation for the “Day of National Unity” on 4 November. Videos and slideshows produced by the state and shown in classrooms across the country depicted beaming caricatures of Russia’s national minorities living harmoniously. Such celebratory material is hardly new to Russia: the Putin regime is merely emulating Soviet-era depictions of racial harmony. In Russia, citizens are told again and again that the country is a model of peaceful ethnic integration.
Yet, perhaps contrary to expectations, the violent pogrom in Makhachkala has not been ignored by the state media, which rarely reports on political protests. As events unfolded on Sunday, major news services and state-aligned social media personalities carried updates and even shared alarming videos from the ground. If the state was worried that the contagion of unrestrained violence might reveal a deeper instability, then its anxiety was well hidden. Indeed, the state’s propaganda organs seemed to relish reporting on the grisly details of arrests made and injuries inflicted in a flood of stories over the next 24 hours.
By Monday, the state’s top political spokespeople added a new dynamic to the story. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov attributed the violence to “interference from the outside… given the circulation of footage showing the horror of Gaza — the deaths of children, seniors, medics — it’s easy for miscreants to manipulate the situation, to provoke and inflame people.” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova chipped in to name the “miscreants” as “the criminal Kiev [sic] regime”. In this reading, Russia is under attack by shadowy forces from the outside; violence within Russia must be evidence not of internal problems but of a world conspiring against the country’s multiracial harmony.
In reality, of course, it is not Russia’s opponents but the Russian state itself that has fuelled the flames of antisemitism at home. In recent years, it has introduced numerous laws targeting non-Orthodox religions. Jewish organisations have come under repeated attacks, culminating in the exile of the now-former chief rabbi of Russia, Pinchas Goldschmidt. The social media channels of major state outlets and their presenters have been accused of using antisemitic language and tropes. In September, Putin himself claimed that the Jewish president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, was only in power to hide his country’s “glorification of Nazism”. Openly antisemitic rhetoric runs rife through official discourse while the slightest transgressions of draconian freedom of speech laws about the so-called “special military operation” or the government’s conduct can result in lengthy jail terms.
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SubscribeWhat, you think it was an accident that this plane purportedly carrying Jewish refugees just happened to stop in Dagestan, the hotbed of Islamic radicalism in Russia? It could have just as easily pushed on to Stavropol, which is only 2% Muslim, and there would have been no riot. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it’s fairly obvious to me that the riot was the expected result of the plane being sent there.
It would have been nice to get some more examples of russian state anti-semitism. The claim that Zelensky (and the Ukraine war effort in general) has glorified Nazism is just a matter of record which is uncomfortable for western governments. This isn’t, in and of itself, anti-semitic. Just two examples will serve as reminders of this fact: the honouring of a former SS soldier in the Canadian parliament following a speech by Zelensky (since apologised for) and the use of explicitly neo-nazi units in the army such as the Azov Brigade (still ongoing). You can support Ukraine, realise that they might need to bolster uncivilised elements of their national recruitment pool and still say that it might not be best to promote this ideology in the long run as it might be used against Ukraine by propagandists. The attacks on “minority religions” by the russian state misses the fact that this is mainly focussed against western, protestant groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Zelensky is the only other Jewish world leader, yet even Ukraine abstained in the UN General Assembly, like Britain, Australia, Canada, India, Germany, Italy, Poland, Japan, South Korea, and even the Netherlands that had already sent in Marines. The United States and Israel must make do with Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Fiji, Guatemala, Hungary, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, and Tonga. And even that was a very long half a week ago.
And your point being…? Your hatred towards jews?
Noted