Abstract
Imagine a country in which only 12 per cent of the adult population are satisfied with their lives, 71 per cent find it a financial strain even to clothe their families, 61 per cent report a deterioration in living standards over the past three months, 67 per cent report a decline in the political situation over the same period, and 41 per cent think that the country runs a high risk of complete anarchy. In the same country, only 13 per cent of adults trust the head of state—3 per cent fewer than distrust him—while 71 per cent express little or no trust in the parliament and 57 per cent express little or no trust in the government. Meanwhile, a mere 2 per cent of the adult population belong to a political party or movement and 53 per cent believe that mass disturbances, anti-government riots and bloodshed are likely to break out. That was the situation in Russia in March 1993 according to a countrywide public opinion poll of 2,000 people conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.2 The poll and others like it show that in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus there is widespread despair, pessimism and political mistrust but no widely perceived economic and political alternative to the status quo. It also suggests potential danger. As Václav Havel recently put it:
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Notes
This section is a revised version of Robert J. Brym and Andrei Degtyarev, “Anti-semitism in Moscow: Results of an October 1992 survey”, Slavic Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 1993, 1–12.
A. Komozin (ed.), Monitoring: The 1993 Russian Citizens’ Opinion Poll Results (Moscow: Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1993).
“The post-Communist nightmare,” The New York Review of Books, 27 May 1993.
Nikolai P. Popov, “Political views of the Russian public”, The International Journal of Public Opinion Research, vol. 4, no. 4, 1992, 330.
Zvi Gitelman, “Glasnost, perestroika and antisemitism”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, no. 2, 1991, 155–6.
See James L. Gibson and Raymond M. Duch, “Anti-semitic attitudes of the mass public: Estimates and explanations based on a survey of the Moscow oblast”, Public Opinion Quarterly, no. 56, 1992, 1–28.
See Alexander Benifand, “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.
Robert J. Brym, “Perestroika, public opinion, and pamyat”, Soviet Jewish Affairs, vol. 19, no. 3, 1989, 23–32.
L. D. Gudkov and A. G. Levinson, “Attitudes towards Jews”, Sotsiologi-cheskiye issledovaniya, no. 12, 1992, 108–11.
Vladimir Zotov, “The Chechen problem as seen by Muscovites”, Moskovsky komsomolets, 12 January 1993.
Geraldine Rosenfield, “The polls: Attitudes toward American Jews”, Public Opinion Quarterly, no. 46, 1982, 443
Robert J. Brym and Rhonda L. Lenton, “The distribution of antisemitism in Canada in 1984”, Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 16, no. 4, 1991, 411–18.
V. B. Koltsov and V. A. Mansurov, “Political ideologies in the perestroyka era”, Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya, no. 10, 1991, 32
V. Yadov et al., “The sociopolitical situation in Russia in mid-February 1992”, Sociological Research, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, 7
L. A. Sedov, “Yeltsin’s rating”, Ekonomi-cheskiye i sotsialnye peremeny: monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, Informatsionny byulleten, Intertsentr VTsIOM (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 1993), 15.
John F. Dunn, “Hard times in Russia foster conspiracy theories”, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Special Report, 23 September 1992.
Ronald D. Lambert and James E. Curtis, “Québécois and English Canadian opposition to racial and religious intermarriage, 1968–1983”, Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 1984, 44, note 9.
Rhonda L. Lenton, “Home versus career: Attitudes towards women’s work among Russian women and men, 1992”, Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 18, no. 3, 1993, 325–31.
As Sonja Margolina recently put it, “[t]he equation of ‘Jews’ and the ‘West’ in the sense of agents of modernization remains until today one of the great ideological clichés of premodern consciousness in the East.”, Sonja Margolina, Das Ende der Lügen: Rußand und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1992), 8.
Zora Bútorová and Martin Bútora, “Wariness towards Jews as an expression of post-Communist panic: The case of Slovakia,” Czechoslovak Sociological Review, Special Issue, no. 28, 1992, 92–106.
Antisemitism World Report 1993 (London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1993), 100–102, 104.
Antisemitism World Report 1992 (London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1992), 68.
In general, however, the income of Jews is above average. For example, the average income in Moscow in February-March 1993 was 11,625 roubles per month, Sotsialno-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie rossiyskoy federatsii v yanvare-marte 1993 goda, Ekonomichesky obzor no. 4, Goskomstat Rossii (Moscow: Respublikansky informatsionno-izdatelsky tsentr, 1993), 145. All the Moscow Jews in my survey were interviewed in those two months. Their average monthly income was 27,218 roubles, more than two and a third times above the city average. This difference appears not to be the result of Jews being more involved in the private sector than non-Jews (Mordechai Altshuler), “Jews and Russians—1991”, Yehudei brit ha-moatsot (The Jews of the Soviet Union), vol. 15, 1992, 33).
In the general population, however, it is the young who are most vulnerable to unemployment. For details on the social composition of the unemployed see Sheila Marnie, “How prepared is Russia for mass unemployment?”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Special Report, 11 November 1992.
Nikolai Popov, Roussina Volkova and Vadim Sazonov, “Unemployment in Science: Executive Summary” (Moscow: VTsIOM, 1991).
V. O. Rukavishnikov et al., “Social tension: Diagnosis and prognosis”, Sociological Research, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, 58.
Arthur Hertzberg, “Is anti-semitism dying out?”, The New York Review of Books, 24 June 1993.
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© 1994 The Institute of Jewish Affairs Limited
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Brym, R.J. (1994). Antisemitism. In: Spier, H. (eds) The Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13515-8_4
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