Why the Kremlin May Turn Against the Jews

While reviving many aspects of the Soviet Union, President Vladimir Putin's regime has avoided one of the most odious of all Soviet practices: state-sponsored anti-Semitism. There are no Soviet-style hidden quotas for jobs or universities and no harangues of Israel and global Zionism that often masked old-­fashioned Jew-hatred.

But the path on which Russia's president is taking his country will make the eventual emergence of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories unavoidable.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, more than a million Soviet Jews fled to Israel, the U.S. and Germany. They were scared not so much of the economic collapse as they were of the rise of right-wing movements — such as Pamyat, which espoused the ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic ideology of the infamous Black Hundred of the tsarist times.

---snip---

Meanwhile, Jew-baiting has started to seep back onto Russia's state television broadcasts. Pro-Kremlin anchors such as Dmitry Kiselyov like to stress the Jewish roots of vocal members of the domestic opposition and political leaders in Ukraine as a principal way to denounce them. If Putin's Russia continues on the same nationalistic, insular and imperial course, it will soon start accusing Jews of disloyalty and perfidy.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-the-kremlin-may-turn-against-the-jews/498983.html