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Anti-Semitism in Moscow: Results of an October 1992 Survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert J. Brym  and
Andrei Degtyarev
Robert J. Brym
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
Andrei Degtyarev
Affiliation:
The Department of Political Science and Sociology of Politics, Moscow State University
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Extract

Public opinion polls show that between 1988 and 1991 some three percent of adult Russians donated money to various political movements, four percent took part in strikes and just over six percent participated in mass rallies and demonstrations. Fewer than one percent of Russians j o i n ed new political parties, still nascent organizations that attract elites, not masses. At the same time, membership in the Communist Party dropped from ten percent to four percent of the adult population of Russia.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , Spring 1993 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

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References

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Moscow City Council in funding the research on which this article is based. The authors bear full responsibility for the interpretations offered here.

1. Luchterhandt, Galina, “Neue politische Parteien und Bewegungen in Ruβland,” Osteuropa 42, no. 5 (1992); 396–409.Google Scholar

2. P. Popov, Nikolai, “Political Views of the Russian Public,” The International Journal of Public Opinion Research 4, no. 4 (1992), 326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Ibid, 330

4. Gitelman, Zvi, “Glasnost, Perestroika and Antisemitism,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 2 (1991): 155–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, a few surveys of perceptions of anti-Semitism among Jewish community leaders in Russia and among Russian Jewish immigrants have been conducted. See Benifand, Alexander, “Jewish Emigration from the USSR in the 1990s,” in Tanya Basok and Robert J. Brym, eds., Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Resettlement in the 1990s (Toronto : York Lanes Press, York University, 1991), 38–41 Google Scholar.

5. Frank J. Prial, “Survey in Moscow Sees a High Level of Anti Jewish Feeling,” The New York Times (30 March 1990): A10.

6. J. Brym, Robert, “Perestroika, Public Opinion, and Pamyat,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 19, no. 3 (1989): 23–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Gudkov, L. D. and Levinson, A. G., “Otnoshenie k evreiam,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 12 (1992): 108–11.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 111.

9. Vladimir Zotov, “Chechenskaia problema v otsenkakh moskvichei,” Moskovskii komsomolets (12 January 1993).

10. For a recent Russian analysis of this myth, see Volina, Margarita, Tainye sily : masonstvo i “zhidomasony” (Moscow : Redaktsiia gazety “Vremia,” 1991)Google Scholar.

11. Rosenfeld, Geraldine, “The Polls : Attitudes Toward American Jews,” Public Opinion Quarterly 46 (1982): 443 Google Scholar; Brym, Robert J. and L. Lenton, Rhonda, “The Distribution of Antisemitism in Canada in 1984,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 16, no. 4 (1991): 411–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here, hard-core anti-Semites are defined as those scoring in the bottom 25% of a scale indicating positive or negative feelings towards Jews. Eight % of Americans and 10% of Canadians outside Quebec had negative feelings towards Jews, i.e., they scored in the bottom half of the scale. The American figures come from a 1981 Gallup poll. We calculated the Canadian figures from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study.

12. V. B. Kol'tsov and V. A. Mansurov, “Politicheskie ideologii perioda perestroiki,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 10 (1991): 32.

13. John F. Dunn, “Hard Times in Russia Foster Conspiracy Theories,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Special Report (23 September 1992).

14. Ronald, D. Lambert and James, E. Curtis, “Québécois and English Canadian Opposition to Racial and Religious Intermarriage, 1968–1983,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 16, no. 2 (1984): 44 Google Scholar, note 9.

15. Gudkov and Levinson asked a question about a global Zionist conspiracy too. Within sampling error, their finding for the proportion of Russians who agree that a Zionist plot exists is nearly the same as our finding for Moscow. We are grateful to A. G. Levinson for supplying us with unpublished data on this question.

16. We combined the two items measuring anti-Semitism in a scale and repeated our analysis. This yielded results similar to those reported below. For the sake of simplicity, we report only the single-time analysis here.

17. R-squared is sensitive to the distribution of cases across categories of the independent variables. If few cases fall into some categories of the independent variables, then the upper limit of R-squared decreases. In the present case, this occurs with income and nationality. The low R-squared does not therefore necessarily weaken our argument.

18. As Sonja Margolina recently put it, “[t]he equation o f Jews’ and the ‘West’ in the sense of agents of modernization remains until today one of the great ideological clichés of premodem consciousness in the East” ( Margolina, Sonja, Das Ende der Lügen : Ruβland und diejuden im 20. Jahrhundert [Berlin : Siedler Verlag, 1992], 8 Google Scholar). For a similar conclusion regarding Slovakia, see Bútorová, Zora and Bútora, Martin, “Wariness towards Jews as an Expression of Post-Communist Panic : The Case of Slovakia,” Czechoslovak Sociological Review, Special Issue 28 (1992): 92–106.Google Scholar