Red‐to‐brown’ Jews and Russian liberal reform

LAiring the last few years, Russian society has witnessed several pivotal developments in the life of its Jewish population (a population that, it is important to remember, is viewed in Russia not so much as an organized religion as an ethnic minority). For example, Anatoly Sharansky, the former Jewish refusnik and currently a member of the Israeli government, was welcomed as an honored guest to the country where he once spent many years in prison. And until recently Boris Berezovsky served as deputy security chief, an esteemed position that no Jew had occupied since the earliest days of the Soviet regime. On the heels of these advances, General Lev Rokhlin, who is half-Jewish and was recently killed under mysterious circumstances, had organized a new nationalist movement known as To Defend the Army and Military Industry and Science. His movement is highly critical of the current government's approach to both the armed forces and Russian society in general. In a summer 1997 letter to President Yeltsin, the general lambasted Yeltsin's entire policy from a nationalistic standpoint and all but called on the army to defy the orders of the commander in chief. Having dropped his membership in Our Home Russia, the official party of power in the country, Rokhlin had sought to forge an alliance with those who are known as the red-to-browns, a loose coalition of communists and nationalists. Evidently Rokhlin was not put off by even the more extremist members of the coalition, for he had befriended both Vladislav Achalov, one of the opposition's leading figures in the 1993 parliamentary uprising, and Vladimir Kriuchkov, the ex-chairman of the KGB and one of the principle players in the August

Alliance · Economic history · Government (linguistics · Judaism · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Power (physics · Sociology · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Soviet and Russian History