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Russia Data Russia Summary Reports: NCSJ report (below) CIA World Factbook U.S. State Dept. - background U.S. State Dept. - Human Rights U.S. State Dept. - Religious Freedom Russian Embassy U.S. Embassy Moscow U.S.-Russia Relations About NCSJ Country Reports Return to Directory

Population: 140 million  (2009 est.)  Ethnic Composition: Russian 79.8%, Tatar 3.8%, Ukrainian 2%, Bashkir 1.2%, Chuvash 1.1%, other or unspecified 12.1% Religion: : 15-20% Russian Orthodox , 10-15% Muslim, 2% other Christian (estimates practicing worshipers as percentage of population; large numbers of non-practicing believers and non-believers are a legacy of Soviet rule) Jewish population: 600,000 2002 Aliyah (emigration to Israel): 3,240 Size: 17,075,200 sq km Capital: Moscow Major cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg Freedom House Rating: Not Free

Currency: 30.32 rubles = $1 GDP: $1.68 trillion (2008 est.) GDP per capita: $16,100 (2008 est.) GDP Growth: 5.6% (2008 est.) Head of State: President Dmitry A. Medvedev   Head of Government: Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin Foreign Minister: Sergey Lavrov Ambassador to United States: Sergey I. Kislyak U.S. Ambassador to Russia: John Beyrle Chronology of all U.S. envoys to Russia

SUMMARY

The Russian Federation in the post-Soviet era has been marked by tremendous but uneven progress and, most recently, by fading hopes for a grand convergence between Russia and the West. A historic expansion of political and economic freedoms in the 1990s has been followed by ever-greater consolidation of executive authority by the Putin administration at the expense of civil society and opposition groups. The economic instability and chaos of the early post-Soviet years was replaced by oil and gas-driven robust economic growth and the gradual spread of prosperity beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2008, the global economic crisis did not leave Russia unscathed, requiring the government to invest over $200 billion to ease the economy after the Ruble experienced significant devaluation and the stock market lost 75% of its value. The generally pro-Western foreign policy of the Yeltsin years has given way to an increasingly assertive, Russia-first approach abroad and a resurgence of traditional Russian suspicions about Western goals and intentions in the former Soviet space. 

Russia has tried to preserve a sphere of influence in what it calls its “near abroad” (the republics of the former Soviet Union, with close historical ties to Russia) while asserting itself on the world stage and often taking positions counter to Western or U.S. interests. In August 2008, tensions between Russia and Georgia escalated into a five-day war, with many countries immediately naming Russia as the aggressor in the conflict. Relations with Israel are friendly, though Russian weapons sales to states hostile to Israel are a continuing source of friction. Human rights are selectively respected, but the Putin administration came under increasing criticism for recentralizing political power, renationalizing the property of political opponents, reestablishing de facto state control over the media and NGOs, restricting the rights of “non-traditional religions,” and reconquering the breakaway region of Chechnya with especially brutal tactics. In March 2008, Putin became Russia’s Prime Minister under his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Since the 1998 financial crisis, economic growth has rebounded, and the economy is now booming, largely as a result of sharp increases in oil and gas prices and some economic liberalization. 

Modern Russia has inherited a rich Jewish heritage as well as a long history of official and popular anti-Semitism from its Tsarist and Soviet precursors, which once included residency, workplace, and education restrictions, periodic pogroms, and denial of emigration rights. A mass exodus of Jews in the 1970s was repeated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, the rate of emigration has since leveled off, and Russia remains home to the world’s fourth-largest Jewish community. Since the Soviet collapse, a Jewish renaissance has generated countless organizations and activities across Russia. Challenges include intermittent state interference in Jewish communal affairs and inconsistent official responses to persistent popular and political anti-Semitism, as well as a loss of funds due to the global financial crisis.


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RUSSIAN FEDERATION

INTRODUCTION
HISTORY
    Soviet Union & Cold War
    Russian Federation
    Chechnya
    Georgia
POLITICAL SITUATION
FOREIGN POLICY
    Successor States (Near Abroad)
    Middle East & Israel
DOMESTIC ISSUES
ECONOMIC SITUATION
JEWISH COMMUNAL LIFE & ANTI-SEMITISM
    Soviet Jewry
    Russian Jewish Renaissance
    Anti-Semitism
U.S. POLICY  

The Russian Federation, nearly twice the size of the United States, is the largest country in the world. Russia straddles 11 time zones across Europe and Asia, bordering the Arctic Ocean, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Pacific Ocean, as well as Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and North Korea. The territory of Russia occupies three-quarters of the former Soviet Union, and Russia inherited most of the USSR’s industrial base, natural resources, military assets, international standing and obligations and former population. Russia’s population is highly diverse in its ethnic, religious and linguistic make-up. 


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HISTORY

The modern Russian State was established in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, particularly under Tsars Ivan III (the Great) and Ivan IV (the Terrible), who transformed and enlarged the Duchy of Moscow into the Russian Tsardom. An earlier predecessor known as Kievan Rus (based in Novgorod and Kyiv) was founded in the ninth century, in part by Scandinavian Vikings, but was destroyed by the Mongols in the 13th century, and its Ukrainian and Belarusian territories came under Polish-Lithuanian rule. In the late 17th century, Tsar Peter the Great expanded the lands under his dominion, founded his new capital city of St. Petersburg, crowned himself the first Russian Emperor and imported Western experts, and customs into his backward empire. His successors continued to push imperial borders in all directions until, at its height before World War I, the Russian Empire incorporated the territories of present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, the Baltics, most of Poland, the Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia, and fought for influence with other great powers in China, Iran, Afghanistan, Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans.

Russia remained an authoritarian and powerful but relatively undeveloped state throughout the 19th century. Rooted in an agrarian economy, Russia did not abolish serfdom until 1861, much later than the rest of Europe. Industrialization did not begin until the late 1800s. The pressures of a rapidly modernizing economy and continued autocratic yet increasingly incompetent rule led to growing public dissatisfaction and opposition to Tsarism by the turn of the century, culminating in the short-lived but violent 1905 Revolution that forced Tsar Nicholas II to grant Russia’s first-ever constitution.

Russia’s ill-fated involvement in World War I led directly to the February 1917 popular rebellion against the by-then widely unpopular Tsar Nicholas II, who was forced to abdicate by a provisional government of liberals and moderate socialists. They in turn fell to an October 1917 Bolshevik coup led by Vladimir Lenin, who signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, capitulating to the Germans and ending Russia’s participation in the war, though Russian territorial concessions were annulled after Germany’s eventual defeat.


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Soviet Union & Cold War

Civil war broke out in 1918 between the Bolsheviks and the so-called White Russians (a very loose coalition of monarchists, democrats and socialists). Most outlying regions of the former Russian Empire (including the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland and Poland) broke away during this period. Despite scarce resources and a limited intervention by foreign powers, including the United States, Lenin’s Bolsheviks prevailed in the fighting by 1921 and the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally established in 1922. The Soviets were forced to recognize the independence of Poland, Finland and the Baltic states, but reannexed much of modern-day Ukraine and Belarus, and all of Tsarist-ruled Central Asia and Siberia, into the USSR.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Josef Stalin became leader of the Communist Party during the 1920s by outmaneuvering his rivals, winning undisputed power over both Party and State by his 50th birthday in 1929. During the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin’s radical policies of rapid industrialization, ruthless collectivization of agriculture, forced relocation of “suspect” populations, and mass purges of suspected oppositionists in the Party and State bureaucracies resulted in many millions of deaths and recast the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state committed to the world-wide victory of Soviet Communism and the near-deification of Stalin himself. 

Moscow, August 23, 1939: Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signing the secret Soviet-German non-aggression pact, as German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet leader Josef Stalin watch

In late August 1939, the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, carving up Eastern Europe in a secret protocol. One week later, German forces invaded Poland from the west. Soviet forces invaded Poland from the east shortly afterwards. Within the brief period of Soviet occupation, Soviet forces deported over one million Poles to Siberia and executed more than 21,000 captured Polish officers at Katyn Forest. By August 1940, the Soviet Union had forcibly annexed the independent Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; seized the regions of Bukovina and Bessarabia from Romania and launched a limited but costly invasion of Finland. Germany violated the non-aggression pact on June 22, 1941 when it attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.

The USSR played a central role in the Allied victory over Germany in World War II, suffering casualties and losses estimated at $27 million or more, including nearly 9 million troops killed. In the postwar world, the Soviet Union consolidated its domination of Eastern Europe and became a nuclear-armed superpower rival to the United States.

Stalin’s repressive policies continued after the war, stifling widespread hopes for liberalization. The western territories formally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 (western Ukraine and Belarus, the Baltic States, Moldova, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia) were subject to rigorous nationalization and collectivization. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign of 1948 targeted Jews and other “foreign” nationalities with relatives and other connections abroad. Finally, the 1953 Doctors’ Plot, which accused several prominent Jewish doctors of plotting to kill Stalin, as well as ominous rumors of an imminent mass deportation of all Jews to Siberia, were averted by Stalin’s death in March 1953.

In response to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense alliance by the United States and Western European powers in 1949, the Soviet Union and the socialist Eastern European states signed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, formalizing existing Soviet de facto military and political control over the region.

Stalin’s successors maintained autocratic but less openly brutal rule while expanding Soviet strategic power. Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964) did formally rehabilitate many individuals and groups repressed during the Stalin regime in an attempt to distance himself from his ruthless predecessor (widely known as “The Thaw”). His successor Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982) ended even this mild de-Stalinization and concentrated on domestic stability above all else. From the 1950s until the late-1980s, however, the USSR competed with the U.S.-led West for global power and influence, especially in developing countries across the Third World. This competition generated regular crises and confrontations over numerous Cold War flashpoints like Korea, Berlin, Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam and Afghanistan. 

Robert Knudsen /  John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library

President John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall, June 1963

The U.S.-Soviet nuclear balance of power and the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction deterred direct conflict between the two superpowers, but crises such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1973 Middle East Yom Kippur War occasionally brought the two sides to the brink of nuclear confrontation. In the Middle East, the Soviet Union supported Arab states while the United States generally backed Israel. 

U.S.-Soviet competition did fuel advancements in science. A ‘space race’ between the Soviet Union and the United States generated the first man-made satellite (Sputnik, 1957), the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin, 1961) and the 1969 U.S. moon landing. The July 1975 joint Apollo-Soyuz mission also provided a short-lived example of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation.

Soviets launch Sputnik 1 October 1957

Americans reach the moon July 1969

Soviet Communist leaders maintained exclusive power using ruthless and pervasive organs of social control such as the KGB. Human rights violations remained rampant despite the Soviet signing of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, an international accord that committed the USSR to respect human rights. Individual and cultural rights were deemed secondary to the needs of the Soviet people and the state. In this light, from the late 1940s through the 1980s, anti-Jewish discrimination was widespread and Soviet Jews increasingly struggled for the right to emigrate. Agitation to emigrate frequently resulted in still worse social and economic hardship, giving birth to the Refusenik movement among those who had been refused exit visas. 


OSCE

Signing the Helsinki Final Act, 1975

By the late 1970s, critical problems inherent in the Communist political and economic system accelerated economic decline, even as Soviet military power peaked under Leonid Brezhnev. The 1979 invasion of Afghanistan further drained Soviet resources, while the economy continued to stagnate. The invasion embarrassed the Soviet Union internationally and triggered the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. Social and political unrest mounted within Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe through the 1980s. In particular, the Solidarity independent trade union was formed in Poland in response to labor turmoil in 1980 and spearheaded growing national resistance to Communist rule even after the Soviet-backed Warsaw government declared martial law in 1981 in an attempt to defeat it. 

Following two aged and infirm leaders (Andropov, 1982-1984, and Chernenko, 1984-1985), the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-91), broke new political ground with bold reforms aimed at modernizing the USSR, including economic restructuring (perestroika) and a loosening of restrictions on political, social and cultural activity (glasnost).


Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik

Gorbachev also moved decisively to reduce tensions with the West. His 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan signaled a shift in relations between the two powers, including a move toward greater general cooperation with a specific focus on disarmament and human rights.

The shift toward cooperation with the West became most obvious in 1990-91, when the USSR supported moves by the United Nations Security Council to reverse Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. This move contradicted Moscow’s extensive record of military cooperation with Iraq and Iraq’s outstanding $70 billion debt to Moscow. Following the Gulf War, the Soviet Union supported UN Security Council Resolution 687, which in April 1991 established an arms inspection regime for Iraq. The Soviet Union also joined the United States in co-sponsoring the October 1991 Madrid Middle East Peace Conference, which created the framework for Arab-Israeli negotiations in the decade to follow. 


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Russian Federation

By mid-1991, Moscow’s global power and influence were in steep decline, highlighted by the abolition of communist rule in Eastern-bloc states during 1989. After an unsuccessful August 1991 coup by Kremlin hardliners and an early December 1991 agreement by the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to replace the USSR with a much looser Commonwealth of Independent States, Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR on December 25, 1991. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved on the following day, and Boris Yeltsin – former Gorbachev ally, a leading opponent of the coup and leader of the Russian Soviet Republic since June 1990 – became President of the newly independent Russian Federation. These rapid and dramatic events ended the Cold War and the Post-War Era, and introduced 15 newly-independent post-Soviet states onto the world stage 

The Russian Federation quickly entered a prolonged period of turmoil as economic dislocation brought on by the transition from the dysfunctional Soviet economy impoverished many Russians, political chaos nearly paralyzed their government and organized crime came out in the open. In October 1993, political conflict between the Russian Parliament (the Duma) and the Yeltsin government erupted into open warfare in Moscow as the Russian Army crushed an armed uprising by Parliament supporters. In December 1993, a new Parliament was elected, and a new constitution enhancing executive branch powers was approved by national referendum. In the 1996 Presidential election, Yeltsin came back against long odds to defeat Communist challenger Gennadiy Zyuganov with the backing of many in the West and in Russia unwilling to see a return of the Communists to power.

While relations between Russia and the West improved dramatically following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s set Russia’s new leadership at odds with the West. Russia sided with their fellow Orthodox Serbs during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and resisted Western pressure on Serbia and the eventual introduction of UN and then NATO peacekeeping forces into the region. Furthermore, NATO’s courting of former Warsaw Pact nations in Central and Eastern Europe at the same time inflamed many Russians, who resented their loss of influence over former satellite states.

Yeltsin’s last years were tumultuous, with frequent cabinet rearrangements and the surprise firing of several Prime Ministers. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and FSB (internal security) chief, was the last Prime Minister appointed by Yeltsin in August 1999 before his sudden resignation on December 31, 1999. Putin assumed the dual role of Prime Minister and Acting President until being elected president in March 2000. His domestic popularity soared in the period leading up to the election, largely due to his Chechnya policy but also thanks to the contrast between the vigorous and relatively young new Acting President and the increasingly aged, infirm and mercurial Yeltsin.

Presidential Press Service May 2000: Former President Boris Yeltsin with President Putin at Putin's inauguration

In March 2008, Putin once again assumed the office of Prime Minister under his handpicked successor Dmitry Medvedev. Putin retains a strong approval rating and high popularity among Russian citizens, and there is much speculation that he will return to the office of President in the future. 

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Chechnya

In December 1994, President Yeltsin ordered his military to subdue the breakaway republic of Chechnya, whose ardent nationalist leader Dzokhar Dudayev had declared independence in 1991. By August 1996, following Dudayev’s death in a hard-fought, widely publicized and broadly unpopular campaign that caused massive civilian casualties, darkened Russia’s reputation abroad, and ended in a stalemate, Yeltsin agreed to end the First 

Chechen War and withdraw Federal troops in exchange for freezing the issue of Chechnya’s future political status until 2001. 

Chechnya was effectively independent in the late 1990s and elected its own President, Aslan Maskhadov, who, however, could not bring law and order to an increasingly impoverished and criminalized Chechnya that became a fertile recruiting ground for Islamic radicals from the Middle East. After Chechen Islamic militants attacked the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan in September 1999, newly appointed Russian Prime Minister Putin sent ground troops into Chechnya, beginning the Second Chechen War and dramatically raising his popularity with most voters. Russian authorities also blamed Chechen terrorists for a series of mysterious and suspicious apartment bombings in Moscow and other cities which caused hundreds of deaths.

Russian forces quickly recaptured most of Chechnya as hundreds of thousands of Chechen refugees fled the fighting. Although major combat operations ended in 2000, Chechen rebels have waged guerrilla warfare up to the present time, inflicting casualties on Federal and local forces, assassinating numerous local officials (including Chechnya’s pro-Moscow leader in 2004) and staging raids and terror attacks in other parts of the Northern Caucasus with the help of local recruits, and even in Moscow itself. In 2005 and 2006, however, the rebels lost most of their senior leaders, including former President Maskhadov and notorious warlord turned militant jihadist Shamil Basayev, responsible for the most daring and bloody terrorist attacks of both Chechen wars. By the end of 2006, with top rebel leaders gone, an amnesty offer causing some fighters to give up their weapons and signs of a limited economic recovery underway in Chechnya due to strong indigenous leadership, an end to the long-running Chechen insurgency on Moscow’s terms finally appeared possible. In February 2007, Russian President Putin and then-Defense Minister Ivanov all but declared a victorious end to the Second Chechen War, stating that the Chechen problem had been “solved” after a multi-year effort. Western experts warned that, although badly weakened and no longer unified, the Chechen-led Islamist resistance in the North Caucasus has no shortage of volunteers and is likely to continue, thanks to the region’s stunted economies, repressive officials and continuing harassment of observant Muslims. Current Russian and Western estimates of armed Chechen militants range anywhere from 450 to 1,000 fighters operating in several dozen bands.

International criticism of Russia’s conduct in Chechnya has been persistent, as international organizations cited widespread and systematic human rights abuses by Russian forces, including alleged massacres of civilians and the operation of brutal “filtration camps” for young Chechen males taken away in numerous “security sweeps.” Human rights organizations also have criticized Russia’s failure to punish suspected war criminals among the Russian forces in Chechnya. Colonel Yuri Budanov, the highest-ranking officer to be tried for crimes against civilians in Chechnya, was found guilty of raping and killing a Chechen woman after initially being acquitted by a Russian military court, and is currently serving his sentence. However, international observers, including the EU, have called Russia’s overall efforts in this area inadequate. Human rights groups have successfully lobbied in some cases to have known “problem” regiments removed from the region. 

In the most devastating terrorist attack spawned by the Second Chechen War, Chechen militants seized a school building in the nearby southern Russian town of Beslan on September 1, 2004, holding more than 1,000 students and adults hostage. On the third day of the standoff, shooting broke out between the hostage-takers and Russian security forces in which 344 civilians were killed, 186 of them children, and hundreds more wounded. Some called this tragedy Russia’s 9/11, and Putin himself blamed it on the "direct intervention of international terrorism." He promised a tougher rule in the Caucasus and a new "crisis management system" that would enhance the powers of the security services. Many observers have since noted that these new measures were then used to further enhance Putin's power in an increasingly authoritarian system.

In October 2005, armed militants reportedly connected to and inspired by the Chechen resistance attacked multiple police and government targets in Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, a Caucasus region close to Chechnya. Russian security and military forces quickly defeated the raids, which nevertheless demonstrated the growing reach and recruitment efforts of the Chechen-led Islamist resistance across the North Caucasus. The last three years have been relatively quiet, with few incidents. 


Georgia

On the evening of August 7, 2008, Georgia launched a ground and air based military attack on South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Georgia stated that it was responding to Russian troop movements. Russia responded by sending troops into South Ossetia and launching bombing raids further into Georgia. On August 8, Russian naval forces blocked Georgia's coast and landed ground forces and paratroopers on Georgian coast. Abkhazian forces opened a second front by attacking the Kodori Gorge, held by Georgia and invaded western parts of Georgia's interior. After five days of heavy fighting, Georgian forces were ejected from South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russian troops invaded Georgia proper, occupying the cities of Poti and Gori among others.

French president and EU chairman Nicolas Sarkozy brokered a preliminary ceasefire agreement on August 12, signed by Georgia and Russia on August 15 in Tbilisi and on August 16 in Moscow. After the signing of the ceasefire Russia pulled most of its troops out of Georgia proper. However, Russia established "buffer zones" around Abkhazia and South Ossetia and check points in Georgia's interior.

On August 26, 2008 Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The independence of the two regions has also been recognized by Nicaragua and Hamas. 



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POLITICAL SITUATION  

The Russian government consists of an executive, legislative and judicial branch. Under the 1993 Russian constitution, the President – popularly elected to four-year terms – holds the bulk of the power. In addition to appointing or firing the Prime Minister, the President may dissolve the Parliament, dismiss the Constitutional Court, and issue decrees that are not subject to legislative review. The government is headed by the Prime Minister and is composed of a cabinet of deputies, ministers and other agency heads, all appointed by the President.

An April 2007 State Department report described Russia as a weak multi-party political system with a strong presidency.

The legislative branch consists of a bicameral Federal Assembly with an upper house (the Federation Council) and a lower house (the State Duma). During Putin’s first term, Russia’s 86 (as of March 2007) constituent administrative units (republics, regions, and districts) were consolidated into seven federal districts headed by powerful presidential appointees. Regional chief executives and legislative leaders were removed from the 178-seat Federation Council and replaced with members chosen by regional legislatures. In 2004, direct election of all regional governors was replaced with a system in which governors are appointed by the president. 

The Duma’s 450 seats are popularly elected, half by proportional representation and half in single-member districts. In 2005, the Duma passed a new election law, under which all 450 deputies in the State Duma will be elected on a party list or proportional representation basis from 2007, eliminating election by single-member district. Independent candidates will no longer be able to nominate themselves for office.

The last Duma elections were held in December 2007, with the next elections scheduled for December 2011. United Russia, the pro-Kremlin “party of power” and its allies gained seventy percent of the seats in the Duma, enough to pass any law or change the constitution. President Putin took advantage of this majority to implement wide-ranging political reforms, widely described as centralizing political power and limiting choice for voters. 

In June 2006, despite considerable public opposition, the Duma amended Russian electoral law to eliminate the “against all candidates” ballot option, depriving voters of the ability to cast a meaningful protest vote in future elections. This ballot option was first introduced in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, and had proven popular with Russian voters.

Other important changes to the electoral law made in 2005 and 2006 included a ban on parties joining forces during an election campaign, elimination of a minimum turnout requirement, and raising the minimal vote requirement to win seats in the Duma from five to seven percent. In 2006, the government began promoting anti-extremist legislation that could limit political speech and give it new authority to ban persons or groups accused of “extremism.”

These combined changes have been criticized for eliminating effective political competition and smoothing the way for pro-government parties. Some have even described the Russian political system under Putin as “Potemkin politics,” a “managed democracy” in which a government-controlled media and stage-managed elections guarantee pro-Kremlin outcomes, and where the Soviet-era leading role of the party has been replaced, with the leading role of the state as the organizing principle of the Putin era.

Putin has repeatedly said he favors a political system dominated by a few big parties, which he has argued is more stable than a mosaic of small political groups and better able to resist terrorist threats showcased by the September 2004 Beslan attack. In line with Putin’s vision, Russian politics were dominated by just two large pro-Kremlin parties at the start of 2007: the center-right “United Russia” (the party in power), and the center-left “Just Russia,” founded in 2006, whose leaders also support Putin, and now Medvedev. Regional elections across Russia in March 2007 confirmed the electoral dominance of these two parties and the increasing impotence of opposition parties and candidates.

Smaller and older niche parties – liberals, Communists, and radical nationalists, all of whom opposed Putin –faced an increasingly less level playing field and a growing number of government-sponsored obstacles that appeared designed to marginalize the opposition to pro-Kremlin movements and candidates in the parliamentary (December 2007) and presidential (March 2008) elections. 

Russia’s politics in the near term have been dominated by the run up to and aftermath of its legislative and presidential elections, and especially by the issue of the successor to President Putin. Constitutionally barred from a third term, Putin ‘named’ his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, who then won the election on March 2. Dmitry Medvedev was Putin’s former first deputy prime minister and is still a close ally. Despite numerous calls by politicians and organizations for a constitutional amendment to allow him to serve again, Putin stepped down after his term ended. On November 5, 2008, President Medvedev, in his first annual address to the Federal Assembly, proposed a constitutional amendment to change the presidential term from 4 to 6 years, and the State Duma from 4 to 5 years. The President formally submitted the bill to the State Duma on November 11, 2008. The State Duma swiftly approved the proposal in the three required readings on November 14 (388 in favor/58 against), November 19 (351 in favor/57 against) and November 21 (392 in favor/57 against). On November 26, 2008 the Federation Council approved the bill with 144 votes in favor and one against. 

Russia’s federal judiciary is divided into the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the Superior Court of Arbitration. Though the Constitutional Court tended to serve as the court of final appeal for constitutional matters in the 1990s, the Russian constitution does not clearly delineate the relative levels and roles of the federal courts, so the duties of the three branches sometimes overlap. Judges are nominated for life by the President and subject to Federation Council approval. Jury trials are available in some regions.


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FOREIGN POLICY

Russian foreign policy has evolved substantially since 1992, from early cooperation and compliance with the West, to a more Moscow-centered realpolitik. 

As the primary successor to the USSR, Russia inherited Soviet-era status and commitments in the international arena, including permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council, participation in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and numerous treaties and conventions. As a member of the “Mideast Quartet” of mediators, Russia continues to play a prominent role in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts along with the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

Russia has also demonstrated concern about the status of the millions of ethnic Russians living in the “near abroad,” its term for the former republics of the Soviet Union. Russia’s early hopes of preserving its influence over its former Soviet allies through the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) were mostly dashed in the 1990s as the successor states asserted more independent or Western-oriented foreign policies. While much of Russian foreign policy appears merely reactive against current Western primacy in regional and world affairs, at its core lies the historic Russian pursuit of power, influence and respect on the world stage.


Successor States (Near Abroad)

Moscow’s relationship with the Soviet successor states in the Caucasus and Caspian regions continues to be contentious, especially since Russian interest in these lands, rich with natural resources and industry, remains strong. During the 1990s, Russia transferred roughly $1 billion worth of military hardware to Armenia, and Russia and Armenia integrated their air forces in 1999. In 2003, Russia and Azerbaijan signed accords on increased military, intelligence and counter-terrorism cooperation.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia’s relationship with Georgia has experienced escalating tensions over the Georgian regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the Pankisi Gorge. Russia has supported aspirations of self-determination in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while it has accused Georgia of harboring Chechen rebels in its Pankisi Gorge region. While Russia agreed to support cease-fires in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in exchange for Georgian concessions, it resorted to aerial bombardments, such as in August 2002, against alleged Chechen rebels in the Pankisi Gorge. In August 2008, escalating tensions between Georgia and Russia turned into a five-day war, with Russia ultimately recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s independence. 

Russia has concluded numerous individual agreements with the Central Asian states, increasing Russia’s visibility in the region through the transfer of military equipment and the coordination of military maneuvers. Russia is concerned about the spread of Islamic guerilla and terrorist groups that actively seek to overthrow authoritarian governments in the region, especially in Uzbekistan. It also seeks to maximize its share of Caspian Sea oil and gas and promote pipeline routes through its own territory.

The increased U.S. presence in Central Asia and Afghanistan since September 11, 2001 has altered the power dynamic in this region. The United States received Russia’s consent to use Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states as a base for its military operations in Afghanistan. Still, the increase in U.S. activity and aid has potential consequences for Russia’s continued influence in the region.

Russia - Presidential Press Service Yalta, September 2003: Meeting of the Presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine

Russia’s ties with European successor states – Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltics – remain close, but at times tense. Belarus, ruled by the pro-Russian Aleksandr Lukashenko, is probably Russia’s closest ally. In December 1999, Russia and Belarus signed a treaty for a proposed confederated state. Relations with Moldova are fair, though the Moldovan government is not pleased with the continued presence of Russian troops in the separatist region of Transnistria. Although Russia pledged in OSCE-mediated talks to withdraw all troops and material from the region by December 2003, it has also stated its intention to maintain some forces in the region for ‘security’ purposes. In 2004 a Russian-brokered plan, which would have made the presence of Russian troops permanent, sparked mass protests in Moldova and was shelved. Ukraine has since come up with settlement proposals which have received some backing both from Chisinau and from Moscow but real progress is slow to materialize. Unlike most observers, Russia called the March 2006 Belarus presidential election fair and free. However, recent energy and transportation disputes between Moscow and Minsk have strained relations. As a result, Russian media coverage of President Lukashenko has grown more critical, and the prospect of a Russia-Belarus Union now appears increasingly unlikely. 

Disputes over gas deliveries and payment, and over sovereignty of the gas pipeline that crosses Ukrainian territory, have been a source of tension in Russian-Ukrainian relations for the past decade. Relations soured decisively, however, when Russia openly supported the government candidate in the fraudulent presidential election that sparked Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in December 2004. Ever since the pro-Western opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko came to power as a result of the revolution, relations have been strained.

In October 2002, Russia and Ukraine agreed to form an international consortium to manage the gas pipelines that pass through Ukrainian territory. Tensions over debt owed to Russia were eased in April 2003, when Ukraine agreed to pay $1.4 billion in Eurobonds for gas it diverted in 1999-2000. Disputes over sovereignty of the Ukrainian network of pipelines resurfaced during the gas crisis of late 2005/early 2006, when Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine and subsequently accused it of siphoning off gas destined for Europe. 

In 2008, Ukraine’s support of Georgia in the war between Georgia and Russia increased tensions between the two countries. 

The Russian gas giant, Gazprom, announced in December 2005 that it would increase the price Ukraine pays for gas from $50 to $230 per 1,000 cubic meters. Ukraine rejected such a large increase and wanted any changes phased in. Gazprom cut supplies to Ukraine on January 1, 2006, allegedly because of the failure to reach an agreement. Europe’s gas supply was affected by the stoppage, and Russia was roundly criticized for the move, with many alleging that it was calculated to punish Ukraine for attempting to withdraw from Moscow's sphere of influence and strengthen ties with the European Union and NATO. Russia rejected these allegations, saying it simply wanted a proper market price for its gas. Notwithstanding this claim, the controversy struck a blow to Russia’s international standing, particularly as it had made energy security the top priority of its upcoming G8 Presidency. Despite the recent worsening of Russian-Ukrainian relations, the two countries remain linked by history, culture, trade and a host of other factors, assuring a steady level of cooperation and coordination.

Relations with the Baltic States have improved since the 1990s, but are still merely cool and correct. The withdrawal of Russian troops, the status of the large populations of ethnic Russians in Latvia and Estonia, the pursuit of NATO membership by the Baltic States, and the issue of Russian transit through Lithuania to the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad all contributed to tensions between Russia and the Baltics. Most of these issues have since been settled, although Russia stridently opposed Baltic accession to NATO, which nevertheless took place in 2004. Baltic accession to the European Union (also in 2004) has exacerbated the question of visa-free travel by Russians to Kaliningrad through Polish and Lithuanian territory. Conflicting views of WWII history and the Soviet role in that war and in recent Baltic history remain persistent irritants in Russian-Baltic relations, and featured prominently in the sharp clash between Russia and Estonia in April and May 2007. As of early 2007, Russia had signed final border treaties with Lithuania and Latvia, but not with Estonia.

Russia is widely believed to have orchestrated the cyber attacks on Estonia in April of 2007. The attacks swamped websites of Estonian organizations, including Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters, amid the country's row with Russia about the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, a Soviet-era memorial to fallen soldiers, as well as war graves in Tallinn. These events dramatically worsened relations between Moscow and Tallinn, and relations remain strained. 


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Middle East & Israel

Moscow Hillel

April 2002 solidarity rally in front of Israeli Embassy in Moscow

Moscow has sought to assume much of the Soviet Union’s former role in the Middle East. However, the end of the Cold War has meant a drop in the Kremlin’s strategic presence and influence in the region. Through a revised post-Soviet strategy of marketing its military hardware and expertise to countries in the region, Moscow seeks to increase its currency reserves and reassert its regional role.

The Soviet Union recognized the State of Israel in May 1948, voted in favor of Israel’s membership in the UN the following year, and maintained regular diplomatic relations. Despite this early support for Israel, Soviet authorities suppressed Zionism at home and permitted few Soviet Jews to depart for Israel. By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had shifted its loyalties to the Arab countries and especially Egypt and Syria, which received large contingents of Soviet advisors, aid and arms. The “Six Day” War of 1967 precipitated a Soviet-Israeli break in relations that lasted through the mid-1980s. 

Despite this official policy, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in pursuit of trade and other agreements with the United States, the Soviet Union began allowing Jews to immigrate to Israel. This was largely in response to U.S. and international pressure that linked trade agreements to human rights and freedom of emigration, notably the 1975 U.S. law known as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The wave of mass emigration grew (with some dips) throughout the decade, reaching its peak in 1979. The number of refuseniks, or those who were refused the right to leave, was also growing. By 1980, however, Jewish emigration had dried up due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent worsening of U.S.-Soviet relations. 

The Soviet Union restored diplomatic relations with Israel in October 1991. In 1992, then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres visited Moscow and met with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev. In addition to the exchange of ambassadors, Yitzhak Rabin became the first Israeli Prime Minister to pay an official visit to Russia in 1994. Israeli then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Russian then-President Boris Yeltsin in 1997, and in the first visit by an Israeli President to Russia, then-President Moshe Katsav visited President Putin in Moscow in January 2001. In September of that year, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited President Putin, and in April 2005 Putin reciprocated, becoming the first ever Russian head of state to visit Israel.

In October 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert visited Russia, meeting with President Putin, attending the centennial celebration of Moscow’s Choral Synagogue, and speaking at the Marina Roscha synagogue and JCC, where he encouraged Russian Jews to make aliyah. In September of 2008, Russia and Israel signed a reciprocal agreement canceling tourist visas. Before the agreement, over 100,000 Russian citizens had already visited Israel in 2008, with an expected increase of another 100,000 following the new agreement.

White House photo

U.S. President George W. Bush visiting St. Petersburg's Grand Choral Synagogue, May 2002

Russia, the United States, European Union and the United Nations comprise the “Quartet,” which from 2000 has been working to bring about a Middle East peace agreement that would create a Palestinian state while protecting the integrity of the State of Israel. 

Despite this official rapprochement, Israel and the United States have voiced increasing concern over Russian ballistic missile and technology transfers to Iran, Iraq and Syria. Russia agreed in June 2003 to halt nuclear exports to Iran pending that country’s acceptance of a more comprehensive inspections protocol that would allow unannounced visits to Iranian nuclear sites. 

Following the militant group Hamas’ victory in Palestinian elections in February 2006, Russia invited leaders of the organization to Moscow for talks. The invitation sparked considerable controversy as Israel and many western countries consider Hamas a terrorist organization and have refused to deal with the group.

In the course of the talks, Russia called on Hamas to transform itself into a political organization, recognize Israel's right to exist and keep peace accords previously agreed upon, but Hamas leaders declared that recognizing Israel was not up for discussion. In the greater Middle East, the 1990-2003 UN embargo on Iraq specifically prohibited arms shipments to Iraq, but Russia consistently supported a loosening of the embargo. Russia denied signing a $160 million arms transfer deal with Iraq in 1999.

Russia, France and Germany were opposed to U.S. pressure for a tougher UN Resolution on arms inspections in Iraq through late 2002 (UN Resolution 1441), and voiced strong opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003. However, relations have been more conciliatory since the end of fighting. In May 2003, Russia endorsed the lifting of UN sanctions on post-Saddam Iraq. Russia hoped to recoup the nearly $8 billion in debt and billions more in contracts made with the now defunct Hussein regime by participating in the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq, but these hopes have not been realized. 

In March 2006, a report released by the Pentagon stated that Iraqi documents captured by U.S. troops reveal that the Russians collected information about U.S. troop movements and battle plans at the outset of the invasion by tapping sources inside the American military. They passed this intelligence on to Saddam. Russia denied that these actions had occurred, but the allegations have renewed suspicion about its reliability as an ally.

In contrast, Russia’s proposal to bring uranium from Iran, enrich it in Russia and gather the spent fuel to assure it was not diverted for military purposes was seen as a conciliatory move. Iran rejected the plan in March 2006 after hinting that it might accept, but it remained attractive to the countries aligned against Iran, including the United States and Israel, by keeping the riskiest elements of the nuclear fuel cycle outside the country.

In 2008, Russia accused Israel of supplying arms to Georgia and training Georgian troops. 

Russia has generally supported the UN Security Council’s pressure on Iran to abandon nuclear enrichment efforts while defending Iran’s right to develop a civilian nuclear energy program and strongly opposing sanctions or military pressure on Iran. However, in early 2007, the Russian-Iranian relationship appeared to deteriorate suddenly and dramatically, following Russian allegations of Iranian non-payment for work on the Bushehr nuclear power plant being built by Russia in southern Iran since the 1990s. News reports in March 2007 suggested that most Russians had left Iran, and the Russian government announced that further work would be delayed and delivery of enriched uranium fuel to Iran would be postponed because of the financial dispute. In April 2007, Russian Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov announced that the Bushehr plant will not be completed in 2007 as planned, due to payments problems and unspecified “technical issues.”

The Iranian government condemned what it described as Russia’s policy of double-standards and procrastination in completing the largely-built reactor at Bushehr, called Russia an unreliable partner in the field of nuclear cooperation, and denied it was behind in payments. Both Iran and Russia strongly denied reports that Russia had linked delivery of fuel for the Bushehr nuclear power plant to Iranian compliance with UN demands to suspend its uranium enrichment program. 

However, then Russian National Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov said publicly in mid-March that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be “a direct threat to Russia,” adding that “Russia is doing everything to prevent this.” Shortly afterwards, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov told the State Duma that there was no linkage between the “pause” at Bushehr and UN pressure on Iran, and said that Russia would not support “excessive” sanctions against Iran. Russia joined in the unanimous Security Council vote in late March 2007 to impose new sanctions on Iran over its failure to halt uranium enrichment activities. Many observers argued that Putin’s government was trying to balance competing foreign and domestic lobbies on this issue, and that then President Putin may have decided to avoid further conflict with the United States over Iran, given the long and growing list of U.S.-Russian disagreements. 


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DOMESTIC ISSUES

Modern Russian society offers a stark contrast to Soviet-era controls and institutionalized repression. Expansion of freedom across Russia’s 11 time zones, though still incomplete, has opened opportunities for individual and national achievement unimaginable even 20 years ago. The future of pluralism in Russia, however, has been called into question since the election of President Putin in 2000, whose rule has seen steady erosion of political rights, the reappearance of some Soviet-era restrictions, and an increasingly heavy-handed approach by the government towards the opposition.

Human rights in Russia have become an issue of international concern during the two-term administration of President Putin. The international community has condemned Russia’s handling of the war in Chechnya, citing grievous human rights violations, including numerous allegations of rape, torture and mass executions of civilians by Russia’s military and law enforcement, including both Federal and local Chechen forces.

Furthermore, as part of its recentralization of state power, the Putin administration has limited the authority of regional governors, reduced the number of political parties, curbed media critics, restricted the independence of religious groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and generally marginalized political oppositionists. 

Freedom of religion has been affected by the 1997 Russian Religion Law, which declared all religions equal before the law, but noted the “special contribution” made by Russian Orthodoxy to Russian history, culture, and spirituality, and referred to Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism as Russia’s four “traditional” faiths. The 1997 law has been widely interpreted by officials and the public as granting a higher legal and civic status to the four “traditional” faiths than to all other religions. The law required that religious groups register with state or local authorities by December 31, 2000, and only those religions that were officially recognized in Russia for at least 15 years prior to the deadline acquired full legal status when registered. Despite a difficult registration process, most religious groups completed their re-registration, although a small number declined to do so.

A 1999 amendment to the 1997 law allowed the government to legally liquidate groups failing to re-register, and close to one thousand were eventually liquidated by the Justice Ministry. The law also gave the government authority to ban religious groups outright. This power was used in 2004 by a Moscow judge to ban the local Jehovah’s Witnesses group, although not widely practiced, which then adversely affected the registration and activity of other Jehovah’s Witnesses groups across Russia, who continue to suffer discrimination.

Other minority religious groups, such as the Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Protestants (especially Baptists and Evangelicals), Mormons, Scientologists and the Unification Church have also faced difficulty across Russia in registering and holding services, as have some Muslim organizations. In general, minority religious groups encountered restrictions and legal problems most often at the local and regional level, where officials were more likely to be influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church and local security services, both traditionally hostile to Western-based religious denominations attempting to operate in Russia.

Many Russian media sources are now either controlled by the government or by loyalist oligarchs, and President Putin carefully guards the image of himself and his administration that is presented to the Russian public and the world. For example, media coverage of the bloody 2002 and 2004 Chechen hostage crises in Moscow and Beslan, and their aftermath, were strictly controlled by the government. 

Many observers believe that the Russian government’s case of fraud against Vladimir Gusinsky, former owner of Media-Most and the NTV network was part of an attempt to muzzle media opposition by taking control of Russia’s only independent news network. The Kremlin took control of Gazprom and Gazprom-Media, a creditor and shareholder of NTV, and installed American-born Boris Jordan as head of Gazprom-Media and NTV. Despite the takeover, NTV was still found to be too critical of the Chechen rebel hostage crisis, exposing sensitive information that the government sought to control. Putin publicly criticized NTV’s coverage, and Jordan was removed as head of Gazprom-Media in early 2003, in effect forcing him from his post as director of NTV. By the re-election of President Putin in March 2004, all national television media was under the control of either the Kremlin or pro-Kremlin loyalists. 

A controversial new law on non-governmental organizations was passed in early 2006, which critics charged would stifle civil society by restricting the activities of human rights groups, democracy promoters and other independent organizations by imposing stricter membership, registration and reporting requirements and giving the government expanded authority to monitor and shut down NGOs. The new law was amended after heavy criticism by Western governments and international organizations, but Russian officials, including those at the cabinet level, still regularly accuse the West of using NGOs to try to undermine Russia. Both Russian media and officials often point to the 2003-2005 “color revolutions” in neighboring Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan as examples of alleged Western-funded subversion by NGOs, and claim that restrictions on NGO activity are necessary to prevent similar instability in Russia itself. Many Russia watchers agree that Putin is pursuing a strategy of eliminating independent centers of power apart from the executive in Russia.

In July 2006, President Putin signed amendments to the law “On Countering Extremism,” which expanded the definition of extremist activity to include certain public speech, leading to concerns that the amended law can now be used to stifle political opposition and restrict its legitimate activities and criticism. In April 2007, the Duma (lower house of parliament) passed legislation toughening criminal penalties for extremist activity, which observers noted could allow authorities to punish protesters should protests turn violent.

A European NGO reported in early 2007 that Russia trailed only Iraq in the number of killings of media representatives between 1996 and 2006. Most of the 88 Russian journalists slain during this period were victims of apparent contract murders that usually went unsolved. In particular, two recent deaths of leading investigative journalists - Anna Politkovskaya, shot in October 2006, and Ivan Safronov, who fell to his death in March 2007 – both of whom were critical of the authorities, have drawn strong foreign criticism and accusations of government involvement. Speaking in late March 2007, the head of the media committee of Russia’s Public Chamber acknowledged that Russia has become the second most dangerous country for journalists to work in after Iraq, and said that Russia’s mass media are under attack and becoming increasingly state-controlled, either directly or through Kremlin-friendly businesses that are buying up media outlets.

A study published in late March 2007 by the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Russian human rights organization revealed that every 25th Russian is tortured, beaten, or harassed by law enforcement officials each year. Based on opinion polls carried out in five Russian regions over the past three years, the study (which excluded Chechnya) showcased Russia’s flawed justice system and systematic police mistreatment and abuse of suspects and detainees.

In March 2007, President Putin decreed the creation of a single Federal agency to be responsible for all broadcast and technical licenses, increasing central state control over media content and technology. Although some observers warned that this move was meant to increase control of the Internet in Russia, others argued that the merger really aimed at ensuring the government’s control over Russia’s upcoming switch to digital broadcasting, which is expected to allow dozens of new television channels to begin broadcasting across Russia after 2008.

The heavy-handed official reaction to two small opposition rallies and marches in Moscow and St. Petersburg in mid-April 2007, which saw the use of massive police force and the detention and beating of dozens of peaceful protestors and their leaders, drew widespread international negative coverage and reaction. Many voiced their concern that the Russian government was now openly willing to use violence against small and peaceful opposition rallies. Some speculated that the Kremlin’s reputed fear of a Western-funded Orange-style revolution in Russia was driving its zero-tolerance approach towards political dissent.

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Economic Situation  

Although rich in natural resources, industrial capabilities, and an educated labor pool, Russia initially struggled with a difficult transition from communism to capitalism after the breakup of the Soviet Union, during which incomes, living standards and economic output plummeted while the government struggled to push through vital economic reforms in the face of considerable opposition from a Communist-dominated parliament. It had also inherited the social, environmental, and economic costs of Soviet-era failed policies and the USSR’s obsolescent infrastructure.  Russia’s economic progress in the 1990s was piecemeal and turbulent, culminating in the 1998 default crisis that was sparked by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a growing debt problem, persistent structural weaknesses, and an unwelcoming climate for foreign investment typified by bureaucratic obstacles, widespread corruption and the extensive influence of organized crime. Russian financial woes, in turn, strongly affected most other Soviet successor states and touched off worldwide sales of ruble-based assets.

Shai Franklin Aerial view of Volgograd

Since 2000, Russia has experienced impressively robust economic growth, aided in large part by the significant increase in world oil and gas prices, which has produced a dramatic reversal of its macroeconomic situation since the Yeltsin years. All major economic indicators for Russia have risen sharply in recent years, including GDP, real incomes, consumer demand, foreign reserves, foreign direct investment (FDI), the federal budget surplus and balance of payments, even as the poverty rate fell below 20 percent and regional disparities declined. Economic reforms enacted by the Putin government, tight fiscal discipline, and improved enforcement of simplified tax regulations also contributed to the rapid recovery of the Russian economy. Between 2003 and 2006, the 3 major Western ratings firms upgraded Russia’s credit rating to “investment grade BBB+,” helping Russia to attract an estimated $31 billion in FDI in 2006 (mostly in the energy sector, and much of it returning capital), more than doubling its 2005 FDI. The ruble was made fully convertible in July 2006. Thanks to its windfall oil and gas export earnings, Russia was able to prepay its entire remaining Soviet-era Paris Club debt of $22 billion in late 2006. While capital flight took billions of dollars out of Russia during the volatile 1990s, there is evidence that this trend is now partly reversing itself. Recent large foreign investments in Russia from known tax havens such as Cyprus, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man are believed to be largely returning Russian capital. Riding a wave of petrodollar-fueled optimism, President Putin made doubling Russia’s GDP (from early in his first term) by 2010 a key national goal.

However, observers note serious and accumulating problems in the Russian economy, first and foremost being its current dependence on commodity exports. Both Russia’s economy and the state budget remain vulnerable to swings in world commodity prices, given that exports of oil, natural gas, metals and timber account for more than 80 percent of Russia’s exports and form fully a third of government revenues. Most observers agree on Russia’s need to diversify future economic growth from its current dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources. Moreover, Russia’s domestic oil and natural gas production capacity is expected to decline in the future, forcing Russia to rely more on external energy sources, such as Central Asian oil and gas, and constraining future earnings from energy exports. Russia’s surfeit of petrodollars led its government to relax fiscal discipline in its 2005, 2006 and 2007 budgets, since oil revenues have made possible increased state funding of a wide range of domestic initiatives, reforms, and investments, including a much higher level of defense spending and a significant expansion of government bureaucracy.

Russia’s industrial base is largely dilapidated, faces rising production costs after decades of underinvestment and requires substantial capitalization and modernization to compete globally. Recent appreciation of the ruble and the Putin administration’s well-publicized persecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and dismantling of his Yukos oil company in 2003-2004 affected foreign investor confidence and revived concerns about the government’s commitment to respecting property rights and the rule of law. Finally, Russia’s shrinking population and low life expectancy among working-age men in particular do not bode well for its labor pool. The Putin administration’s export-funded stabilization fund and large foreign exchange reserves (together totaling around $400 billion in late 2006) are expected to mitigate at least some of the above problems in the short term. However, a mid-2006 IMF report concluded that Russia cannot sustain current high levels of growth without accelerating structural reforms, even with continued high oil prices.

Unemployment declined to an estimated 6.6 percent in 2006, while inflation stayed relatively high at an estimated 9.8 percent. Large income gaps persist between many Russians and a high-earning minority, although observers also note the visible growth of an urban middle class (largely composed of professionals and civil servants). Significantly lower than in previous years, the poverty rate is now estimated at around 18 percent, although regional rates vary greatly. Speaking in December 2005, President Putin estimated the number of Russians living in poverty was 25 million. The minimum wage is projected to remain below subsistence levels. Government social programs often struggle to meet basic needs of Russian citizens, and their limited funding is sometimes wasted by bureaucratic mismanagement. These figures are expected to change due to the global financial crisis and its effect on the Russian economy. 

Governmental corruption and organized crime are widespread and pose a significant challenge to Russia’s state, society and economy. Russia’s Interior Minister (its highest law enforcement official) said in March 2007 that up to one-tenth of Russia’s territory “is under the control of organized crime groups, who often face little or no official resistance,” noting the strength of the mafia in Moscow, St. Petersburg, southern Russia and Siberia in particular. 
Other Russian sources have said that as much as 25 percent of Russia’s GDP may be generated by the underground economy, mostly controlled by up to 10,000 organized crime groups who often operate under legal cover and boast official patronage. A senior Russian official told a law enforcement conference in February 2007 that the recruitment of retired members of security and law enforcement agencies by criminal structures (which in fact had been taking place since the early 1990s) is becoming “a huge problem for Russia.” The September 2006 murder of highly respected Central Bank Deputy Chairman Andrei Kozlov, Russia’s top banking regulator, was widely blamed on his efforts to reform the banking sector and de-license banks accused of money laundering, and was said by some to signal a reprisal by corrupt officials and organized criminals against government reform efforts.

In 2008, a corruption index compiled by Transparency International gave Russia 2.1 points out of ten, its worst performance for eight years and on a par with Kenya and Bangladesh. Ordinary Russians are well aware of this, with three-quarters of them describing the level of corruption in their country as “high” or “very high”. The size of the corruption market is estimated to be close to $300 billion, equivalent to 20% of Russia’s GDP. INDEM, a think-tank that monitors and analyses corruption, says 80% of all Russian businesses pay bribes. In the past eight years the size of the average business bribe has gone up from $10,000 to $130,000, which is enough to buy a small flat in Moscow. 

Russia’s main trading partners are CIS and EU countries and the United States, to whom it exports mostly gas, petroleum products, metals, and timber. Russia is also the primary trading partner for most of the Soviet successor states. Trade relations with Europe were boosted by increasing world energy prices and rising consumer demand, with the EU receiving over 25 percent each of both its oil and natural gas from Russia as of late 2006. The EU currently accounts for about 52 percent of Russia’s exports (60 percent of which are energy/mineral fuels), and this number is expected to rise even further. Negotiations continue on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), with conflicts over investment climate, market access and government subsidies slowing progress. WTO membership could promote the creation of a free trade area with the EU, which agreed in 2003 to create a common economic space with Russia over the long term. Both the EU and the United States have designated Russia as a “free market” economy. However, Russia’s refusal to date to sign an energy and investment charter promoted by the EU has become a major obstacle to closer economic ties and investment, as have persistent problems with enforcing intellectual property rights in Russia, and Russia’s continuing failure to graduate from Jackson-Vanik requirements in the United States.

Reform of the energy sector was stymied in the 1990s, but resumed following the Russian government’s acquisition in March 2003 of a majority stake in Gazprom, the country’s energy monopoly. While Gazprom currently subsidizes local gas prices, it expects to raise energy prices for domestic consumers in several stages to free market levels by 2010. Unified Energy Systems, Russia’s largest electricity producer, is likewise pursuing reform to address falling output and rising production costs, although progress has been slowed by insufficient private sector investment and its subsequent request for federal funding. 

Struggles between the so-called oligarchs and the Kremlin, common during the Yeltsin years, abated under Putin’s leadership, although only after Putin’s public and pointed defeat of Gusinsky, Berezovsky, and Khodorkovsky between 2000 and 2005, all of whom had come to oppose the President. Russia’s surviving “oligarchs” have learned their lesson and largely retain their grip on most of the country’s commercial infrastructure in return for loyalty to the Kremlin and political quietism. Rapid and opaque privatization during and after the fall of the Soviet Union enabled well-connected Russian entrepreneurs to snap up state-owned properties at artificially low prices, granting them great wealth and influence in the 1990s. After coming to power, Putin largely subdued and assimilated the oligarchs through a combination of legal, economic and judicial reforms, outright intimidation and persecution by the state and cooptation (for example, the richest man in Russia, Roman Abramovich, is also the governor of a Siberian province). 

Putin’s campaign against former Yukos oil magnate Michael Khodorkovsky was the most prominent case of Kremlin-oligarch conflict in recent years. Once the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky had publicly opposed state control of the pipeline industry, complained about corruption, started to fund various opposition parties, and reportedly began to consider running for president during the first Putin term. Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003, charged with various counts of fraud and tax evasion, and tried while his oil company was dismantled by the state, its key assets bought up by state-controlled firms. On May 31, 2005, Khodorkovsky was found guilty of six charges, including tax evasion, and sentenced to nine years in prison (later reduced to eight), which he is currently serving in a Siberian labor camp. Khodorkovsky’s trial and conviction were widely condemned outside Russia as political, and were seen by many as evidence of President Putin's heavy-handed approach to opposition and criticism. In February 2007, Russian officials filed new theft and money laundering charges against Khodorkovsky.

Russia joined the World Bank in 1992. Since then, the Bank has approved over $13.4 billion for a wide range of projects to improve the public and private sectors, the environment, education, health and welfare. The Bank has already disbursed over $8 billion towards existing projects in collaboration with other international institutions, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and World Health Organization (WHO). In 2005, the Bank’s Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) for 2003-2006 published a progress report stating that Russia had made significant gains in the target areas of improving the business environment and enhancing competition, improving public sector management and mitigating social and environmental risks. Russia has also paid back the entirety of its debt to the World Bank.

IMF-funded projects in Russia have focused on significant structural and fiscal reforms. Since its initial membership in 1992, the Russian government has withdrawn over $11.3 billion. The IMF-Russia relationship went through a period of tension when the IMF suspended its aid to Russia in 1999 following allegations that the Russian Central Bank had diverted hundreds of millions of IMF dollars – targeted for debt repayment and fiscal reform – to private offshore accounts. Since that time, Russia has worked to rebuild trust with the IMF. In January 2005, Russia repaid early its remaining $3.3 billion debt to the IMF, thanks to ballooning oil revenues. Most observers feel that, in sharp contrast to the 1990s, Russia’s relationship with the IMF is no longer central to its economic health and development plans, especially given its accruing windfall oil and gas profits.

In late 2008, global financial crisis severely impacted Russia's financial markets. The banking sector is in turmoil, while the stock market is among the worst affected in the world, losing 75% of its value in the past six months. The ruble has lost 17% of its value against the U.S. dollar since August. The government has injected more than 200 billion dollars of liquidity into the Russian banking system to ease credit pressures. Furthermore, the IMF and World Bank are predicting a growth in inflation and have scaled back growth predictions for the coming years from over 7% to 3%. 


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Jewish Communal Life & Anti-Semitism


Soviet Jewry

Despite the active participation of many Jews in the Bolshevik cause, prominent Jewish intellectuals eventually became targets of Stalin’s paranoia after World War II. Although Stalin encouraged wartime solidarity between Soviet and Western Jews in an effort to gain American support, soon after the end of the war he used links between Soviet Jews and the outside world as proof of alleged Jewish disloyalty and untrustworthiness. Beginning in 1948, Stalin moved forcefully against Soviet Jewry, disbanding the influential Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, ordering the death of its famous chairman, and launching a campaign against “rootless cosmopolites,” widely understood to mean Jews. In 1952, Stalin had a number of leading Jewish cultural figures executed in what became known as the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” In early 1953, a group of Jewish doctors was arrested on false charges of having murdered two leading Soviet politicians and plotting to kill others in an affair known as the “Doctors’ Plot.” Only Stalin’s March 1953 death saved the doctors from execution and possibly the entire Soviet Jewish community from a widely rumored impending mass deportation to Siberia and Central Asia, a fate suffered by several other small “suspect” nationalities under Stalin’s rule. 

While existential threats against Russian Jews subsided under Khrushchev, the Soviet State launched a new campaign to stamp out Jewish religion and culture. Jews were systematically excluded from many professions and institutes of higher learning, and many remaining synagogues were closed. In the early 1960s, a disproportionate number of Soviet Jews were imprisoned or executed during a widely publicized campaign against “economic crimes.” 

In 1967, in response to early Soviet Jewry advocacy efforts, the Soviets permitted limited Jewish emigration. The June 1967 Six-Day War brought this emigration to a virtual halt. At the same time, Israel’s victory sparked a reawakening of Jewish consciousness and pride among Soviet Jews. The harsh sentences meted out in 1970 to 11 would-be airline hijackers (all but two of them Jewish) attempting to escape the Soviet Union gave new impetus to the international Soviet Jewry advocacy movement.

Bill Aron

This movement involved the coordinated efforts of diaspora Jewry, Israel, human rights activists and Western governments, in concert with dissidents in the Soviet Union. Refuseniks lost their jobs and social status and were vulnerable to KGB surveillance, harassment, and even imprisonment. Thousands of U.S. citizens visited Soviet refuseniks in the 1970s and 1980s, and U.S. officials even hosted Passover Seders for Jewish activists at the Moscow Embassy to show American support for Soviet Jewish emigration.

In conjunction with improved relations with the West during the era of détente, Jewish emigration increased in the years 1971-73. However, in August 1972, the Soviet government instituted a new “diploma tax” for emigrants, prompting the U.S. Congress to pass the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Bill of 1974, which prohibited the extension of most-favored nation (MFN) status to non-market countries that restrict emigration. (MFN has since been renamed “normal trade relations.”)

Emigration increased once again in 1977-79, reaching a high of over 51,000 émigrés in 1979. During the late 1970s, however, a new round of prosecutions of Jewish activists also took place, with the show trials of such prominent activists as Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, Yosef Begun, the Slepaks and Ida Nudel, and the interrogations and arrests of countless others.

After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the consequent sharp deterioration in Soviet-U.S. relations, Jewish emigration from the USSR dropped significantly, reaching a low of 896 in 1984. In December 1987, 250,000 demonstrators converged on the National Mall in Washington, calling on Gorbachev to open the gates of emigration. The onset of glasnost and perestroika eventually brought dramatic changes in Soviet policies toward the Jewish minority. Emigration increased substantially, reaching a level of more than 185,000 in 1990. A total of nearly 600,000 emigrated from 1989 to 1992, with most going to Israel. The many Russian immigrants of the later 1990s, together with this group, now make up approximately 20% of Israel’s population.


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Russian Jewish Renaissance

 

Russian Jewry ranks as the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world, behind those of the United States, Israel, and France. About half live in Moscow and St. Petersburg; the other half live in dozens of smaller communities throughout the Russian Federation. Since the late Gorbachev era, a dramatic Jewish revival has been underway as Russian Jewry reestablished its diverse religious, social and cultural life after decades of Soviet-era repressions and restrictions. At the same time, Russian Jewry faces serious challenges: continued aliyah, relatively high rates of intermarriage and relatively low levels of religious observance, persistent political and street-level anti-Semitism, including a rising number of attacks by young skinheads and nationalists, the intermittent but influential involvement of the government in communal affairs, and institutional rivalries between competing Jewish organizations seeking to speak for all of Russia’s many Jews.

The major institutional players in today’s Russian Jewish community are KEROOR (the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations of Russia), MERO (the Moscow Jewish Religious Community), REK (the Russian Jewish Congress), and FEOR (the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, itself affiliated with the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, or FJC). KEROOR and MERO represent Russia’s non-Hasidic Orthodox and Reform congregations, REK is an umbrella group representing both observant and non-observant Jews, and FEOR is affiliated with the Hassidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. FEOR’s parent body, the FJC, is led and funded by billionaire Israeli businessman, philanthropist and major Chabad donor Lev Leviev (originally a Bukharan Jew from Uzbekistan). Reflecting the great diversity of Russia’s large Jewish community, other Jewish organizations in Russia include the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC), the World Congress of Russian Jewry, VAAD (Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Russia), OROSIR (the Russian branch of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, representing Reform Jews), and the Jewish Association of St. Petersburg (JASP).

Conference of CIS community leaders and Jewish journalists, March 2003 Federation of Jewish Communities  of the CIS American Jewish leaders meeting with President Putin at the Kremlin, June 2003

Rabbi Adolf Shayevich, the Russian-born Orthodox rabbi of Moscow’s main Choral Synagogue since 1983, and Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the Swiss-born Orthodox rabbi of Moscow’s Jewish community since 1989, are affiliated with KEROOR and MERO, respectively. Rabbi Berel Lazar, the Italian-born Chabad rabbi of the Marina Roscha synagogue, has been head of FEOR since its formation in 1999. KEROOR, MERO and REK recognize Rabbi Shayevich as Chief Rabbi of Russia. In 2000, FEOR elected Rabbi Lazar as Chief Rabbi of Russia, with the result that the Russian Jewish community is currently headed by two chief rabbis, one Orthodox, one Chabad.

In the 1990s, REK emerged as the dominant Russian Jewish umbrella organization after its founding in 1996, thanks to the stature, wealth and drive of its founder Vladimir Gusinsky, a media and banking magnate described as one of Russia’s “oligarchs” under President Yeltsin. REK built a new synagogue and Holocaust museum in Moscow’s Victory Park in 1999. However, the growth of the Chabad movement in Russia during the 1990s (FJC was established in 1998, FEOR in 1999), and the 2000 election of President Putin led to major changes.

Shai Franklin

Synagogue and Holocaust Memorial at Moscow's Victory Park 

Gusinsky came into sharp conflict with the Putin administration over critical media coverage of the government by newspapers and television networks then owned by Gusinsky (especially due to their coverage of the Second Chechen War). As a result, Gusinsky was arrested, prosecuted and forced into de facto exile during 2000-2001, and had to resign as REK president. 

Relations between the Chabad-affiliated FEOR and the non-Hasidic KEROOR and REK are complex and often tense, reflecting their conflicting visions for Russia’s Jewish community, levels of funding, and relationship with the Kremlin. However, rivalries among Russia’s major Jewish institutions are not limited to the Chabad/non-Chabad divide.

In September 2005, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, a Swiss citizen who has served as Moscow’s chief rabbi since 1989, was denied entry after returning to Moscow from abroad, and his visa was cancelled, forcing him to go to Israel. Following an international lobbying campaign on his behalf, Goldschmidt eventually received a one month visa in December 2005 and a one year visa in January 2006. 

Lesley Weiss  




Breaking with his Tsarist and Soviet predecessors, President Putin enjoyed a good relationship with the Russian Jewish community, expressing sympathy for Jews and a commitment to oppose anti-Semitism, making public appearances at community events, and meeting with prominent Israeli and Jewish leaders. Speaking at the September 2000 dedication of Moscow’s Marina Roscha Synagogue, he stressed that the revival of Russian Jewish life “is an integral part of the general revival of folk traditions and spiritual values in Russia. . . [This] spiritual revival is unthinkable without understanding that Russian culture is a combination of traditions of all the people who have lived in Russia for centuries.” Putin has also sent official greetings to Russian Jews on major Jewish holidays, such as Passover and Chanukah. 

Prior to his election, President Medvedev had paid several visits to the Jewish community in Russia. On December 11, 2007, Medvedev joined the Chabad JCC in Moscow to celebrate Hanukah. At this event, Medvedev made several strong comments relating to anti-Semitism in Russia. Regarding extremism and xenophobia Medvedev said, “These phenomena exist; we must not close our eyes to them. It is the state’s role to clearly and rigidly fight these manifestations.”

Putin’s positive relationship with the Russian Jewish community and his generally sympathetic approach towards Israel (he was the first Russian head of state to visit Israel, in 2005) contrast with his administration’s seizure of some of the largest amounts of Jewish-owned assets in Europe since World War II, as a result of Putin’s moves against the once-giant industry, media and petroleum business empires of Jewish oligarchs Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. After opposing Putin during his first term in office, Berezovsky and Gusinsky are in exile in Britain and the United States, respectively, and Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, is serving an 8-year prison sentence for tax evasion and fraud in a Siberian labor camp. Putin’s attacks on these oligarchs, very popular with most Russians, have also resurrected old clichés about “Jewish capital” and “Jewish control” in nationalist circles.

There are now countless Jewish institutions in Russia. These include Russia-wide and international organizations, local community centers, religious organizations, synagogues and burial societies, educational institutions, research groups, aliyah and emigration bureaus, theaters, cultural societies, libraries, sports clubs, youth groups, veterans groups, welfare and charity organizations, pensioners’ clubs and mass media. The focal point of the Jewish renaissance is Moscow. The 100-year-old Moscow Choral Synagogue (which held a high-profile centennial celebration in October 2006, attended by the Israeli Prime Minister, the Mayor of Moscow, and leading Russian and Jewish figures) and the Chabad-affiliated Marina Roscha Synagogue in Moscow have been key centers of Jewish activity, accommodating and organizing many religious, academic and social programs. 

In May 2005, Russian Jewish businessman and philanthropist Arkady Gaydamak was elected president of KEROOR. Gaydamak was previously active in and a major donor to FEOR. Gaydamak has said he plans to boosted KEROOR’s budget to promote funding of education and provincial outreach efforts, and has attempted to strengthen his group’s ties to Putin’s Kremlin.

In June 2006, MERO and KEROOR signed a multi-million contract for the construction of a Jewish Community Center next to Moscow’s Choral Synagogue, on land near the Kremlin donated by the Moscow city government. The ambitious complex plans to contain communal institutions such as a school, a hospital, a kosher restaurant, and a major new museum. The complex aims at attracting Moscow’s non-practicing Jewish majority.

In November 2006, Russia’s first industrial-scale matzah factory opened in the town of Istra outside Moscow. Funded by Leviev, the factory – run by the Chabad-affiliated FEOR – was said to have provided about 200 tons of matzah for Jewish communities in Russia and across the CIS during Passover 2007 and was expected to largely replace existing matzah imports from Israel and Ukraine to Russia by 2008.

The VAAD (Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Russia) was Russia’s first Jewish umbrella group, founded in 1989 during the glasnost era. It has actively promoted establishment of National Cultural Autonomies (NCAs) within the Jewish community. These autonomies, established under a 1996 law, would ensure government support to communities that work within the framework of the law. Jewish communities in St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk and a few other cities have already worked to establish NCAs. 

The Jewish University in Moscow, established by Yevgeny Satanovsky in 1991, operates in conjunction with Moscow’s Open University, and recently established a Center of Jewish Studies and Jewish Civilization at Moscow State University. Also in Moscow, the Maimonides State Jewish Academy has about 40 students, and the Russian-American Center for Jewish & Biblical Studies – affiliated with the Russian State University for Humanities – educates about 50. In St. Petersburg, the Petersburg Institute for Jewish Studies has been operating since before 1992 and helps coordinate the activities of the Center of Biblical & Hebrew Studies at St. Petersburg State University. Together, these schools educate 400-500 students in higher Jewish studies. 

American and Israeli assistance organizations are also active in Russia. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC/ “Joint”) has established offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Omsk in an effort to strengthen Jewish communal life and meet social welfare needs. Since before the Soviet breakup, JDC has provided basic and ongoing assistance to needy Jews across Russia, and remains the single largest provider of social/welfare resources to Russian Jewry. JDC also cultivates educational, cultural and religious life, partly through the establishment of community centers, libraries and other communal facilities. The Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI/ “Sochnut”) operates, with local cosponsors, in 62 local offices across Russia, holding classes for potential émigrés and coordinating aliyah. 

The World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ), active since 1991, works with 29 progressive congregations in Russia as well as over 60 communities in other successor states. The Russian branch of Reform Jewry is known as OROSIR. The World Union maintains its Russian headquarters in Moscow, where it has established an Institute for Modern Jewish Studies (“Machon”) that trains Jewish leaders for other communities. Hineni, an active Reform congregation in Moscow, is supported by the World Union. Their bi-annual conference was held in Moscow in 2005.

Shaarei Shalom, the first community-owned Reform synagogue in Russia, opened in St. Petersburg in June 2007. Built with $2 million donated by British Reform Jews, the synagogue will also host a library, classrooms, kindergarten, youth club and kitchen. 

The Moscow Institute for Jewish Studies, an educational center led by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, operates seminars and teacher training, as well as various outreach projects. Similar programs under the auspices of Rabbi Steinsaltz operate throughout Russia.

ORT, a worldwide technical-training organization founded in St. Petersburg in 1880, returned to Russia shortly after the Soviet breakup. It has established Jewish schools and technological upgrades for other Jewish resource centers in cities across Russia, including in Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In April 2007, the Gunzburg ORT School in St. Petersburg was among the winners of the 2007 Russian Presidential Award for innovation and excellence in education, and received a cash prize of one million rubles (about $38,000). The Gunzburg School serves 420 students aged six to 17, and combines Russian, Jewish and technological subjects in its curriculum.

The global financial crisis is impacting support for Jewish organizations and activities. In November 2008, Lev Leviev asked the Or Avner system of schools, the largest system of Jewish schools in the FSU, to cut their budgets. Leviev is their main benefactor, and in 2008 alone his main holding company lost 75% of its value. 

Hillel operates 18 centers in Russia, as part of the worldwide network of the Hillel Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Activities include holiday celebrations, youth leadership seminars and cultural programs for students and young adults. Hillel oversees Birthright youth missions to Israel, in cooperation with the Federation of Jewish Communities. Hillel recently concluded an agreement with JAFI to oversee joint projects in Russia and the promotion of a national Hillel organization for all Jewish students in Russia.

Project Kesher operates centers in Russia, offering leadership seminars and support systems for those combating domestic violence and trafficking in women. Programs also include mother/daughter retreats, peer training and Jewish educational and holiday experiences.

In St. Petersburg, the Jewish Association of St. Petersburg (JASP) coordinates the activities of various Jewish public and cultural groups in Russia’s second-largest Jewish community, estimated at around 80,000-100,000. JASP has 10 member organizations, including the Jewish University of St. Petersburg, Ami newspaper and the Jewish Welfare Society. In September 2005, with substantial support from the American Jewish community, a new, modern, three-story community center in the heart of the city, “YESOD,” was dedicated and opened in March 2006. In April 2007, YESOD organized a highly successful, widely attended matzah bakery project that provided kosher-for-Passover matzah and an unprecedented opportunity for the local community to learn about, and participate in, Passover.

Jewish life in St. Petersburg was enhanced by the presence of the Grand Choral Synagogue—one of the largest synagogues in the world—as well as by the Tifereth Israel Day School, Sunday schools, Migdal Ohr Yeshiva High School and the Jewish Cultural Society. In September 2006, the Choral Synagogue celebrated its 200th anniversary. The JDC-sponsored Hesed Avraham program uses hundreds of local volunteers to supply aid and medical assistance to thousands of elderly Jews in the city. The Israeli organization Yad Sarah, which also assists the sick and disabled, operates a joint program with JASP.

Limmud, which means “study” in Hebrew, is a dynamic, multi-day event that gathers Jews together for learning. For many years, Limmud seminars and conferences around the globe have attracted Jews of all ages and backgrounds – Jews who have studied Jewish subjects and those who have very little knowledge – to participate in exciting, intense learning experiences. In October 2007, the annual FSU conference was held in Moscow, with over 750 participants from several FSU countries. 

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Anti-Semitism

In 2004, according to the Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism, the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Russia soared from four to fifty-five. This alarming trend continued into 2005 and 2006, which saw increasing public actions, demonstrations and political statements against Jews. The Russian Interior Minister said in February 2007 that hate crimes are on the rise in Russia, are concentrated in urban areas, and mainly target people from the Caucasus and Central Asia. He said that attacks involving foreign nationals rose 27 percent in 2006 compared to 2005. The government has publicly denounced nationalist ideology and expressed support for legal action against anti-Semitic acts, but follow-through has been uneven. Many anti-Semitic attacks continue to be dismissed as hooliganism or random violence.

A respected Russian human rights NGO reported in March 2007 that racist and hate crimes were rising in Russia, and had reached a new peak in 2006. Jewish sites were the most common targets of vandals, accounting for 36 of the 70 reported cases of vandalism that year. Nationalist extremist and skinhead groups staged more than 500 attacks in 2006 (17 percent more than in 2005), in which 54 people died. These attacks most often targeted dark-skinned foreigners or people from Russia’s Caucasus region, typically students and vendors in major urban centers, and especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The report also noted rising anti-extremist activism by NGOs in response, and more active government prosecution of nationalist extremists, but warned that these developments were not yet systematic and were not keeping pace with what it called rapidly growing xenophobia in Russian society.

A leading Russian human rights organization announced in May 2007 that 25 people have been killed and 154 injured in attacks on non-Russians by nationalist extremists in the first quarter of 2007. It presented data showing that, in comparison, seven people were killed by skinheads in the first quarter of 2004, 10 in 2005, and 16 in 2006, demonstrating a multi-year rise in extremist violence in Russia.

Another leading Russian human rights group estimated in 2007 that around 70,000 skinheads and members of extremist organizations were active in Russia and committed hundreds of hate crimes yearly, including near-weekly murders, of which only a handful were prosecuted. The skinhead movement was said to be expanding from major urban centers into provincial towns and even rural settlements across Russia. Underscoring this rise of violent and racist extremist groups, a Moscow medical university ordered its foreign students to stay indoors for three days during and after Hitler’s birthday (April 20th) in April 2007, due to fears of attacks on dark-skinned foreigners by young extremists, who had become more violent around this time in the past.

Some observers note that certain recent official policies appeared to reflect this rising nationalism. For example, the deportation and persecution of Georgian citizens in 2006, and the April 2007 law requiring that all market vendors must be Russian citizens, which has resulted in police round-ups and deportations of non-Russian vendors including many long-term residents of Russia. 

During 2005, several vandalism and arson attacks against synagogues, community centers and cemeteries were officially described as hate crimes. In May 2005, a fire categorized as arson destroyed the historic synagogue of Malakhovka on the outskirts of Moscow. In December 2005, a suspect was sentenced to four years in prison in connection with the arson. In addition, many Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, including in Izhevsk, Kazan, Moscow, Tambov, Tver, Smolensk and St. Petersburg. Authorities in Kazan and Moscow judged the incidents there as hate crimes rather than hooliganism. In 2006, Russian authorities showed growing willingness to charge anti-Semitic perpetrators with “incitement of ethnic hatred” rather than the lesser charge of “hooliganism.” The annual review of anti-Semitic incidents by the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress listed at least 6 occasions in 2006 in which Russian officials used the more serious hate crime charge, including the March 2006 sentencing of a criminal group in Tomsk that had set up a mined anti-Semitic poster and was reportedly planning to attack the Tomsk synagogue.

However, other anti-Semitic attacks continue to be dismissed as hooliganism or random violence. In January 2005, several Orthodox Jews were attacked by a group of skinheads in Moscow, but although police arrested and convicted two suspects of disorderly conduct and of inflicting injuries, the judge declined to recognize racial hatred as an aggravating circumstance. In April 2004, two skinheads were arrested for an attack earlier in the month on Aleksey Kozlov, a human rights activist and anti-Semitism monitor, but the crime was treated as a misdemeanor, and the case was later closed with no further action taken by the police. 

Anti-Semitic actions, including public defamation, vandalism and physical assault, increased in intensity and frequency in 2005 and 2006. One of the most prominent of these was a widely-circulated petition, the so-called “Letter of 500,” which appeared in mid-January 2005 and was signed by 500 public figures, including 20 Duma members. The public letter called for all Jewish organizations in Russia to be outlawed, and accused Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred and conducting ritual murders. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the letter on January 25, as did President Putin in remarks delivered in Krakow on January 27 (a Holocaust memorial day across Europe). On February 4, the State Duma passed a resolution condemning the January 24 letter.

However, in March 2005, approximately five thousand persons, including a number of Russian Orthodox Church clerics and some prominent cultural figures, signed a similar anti-Semitic letter sent to the Office of the Prosecutor General. A Moscow district prosecutor opened an investigation into KEROOR, who had published the translation, as well as into charges brought by Jewish and human rights organizations that the letters violated federal laws against ethnic incitement, but closed both investigations on June 10 without bringing charges.

Other incidents in 2005 included numerous cases of vandalism and arson against synagogues, Jewish centers and cemeteries. Two serious physical assaults on a Russian rabbi and an Israeli student took place in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, in January and February 2005, respectively, causing serious injuries to the victims.

In early 2006, the most violent anti-Semitic attack in recent years took place at a Moscow synagogue. On January 10, 20-year-old Muscovite Alexander Koptsev entered the Bolshaya Bronnaya Synagogue in Moscow and stabbed worshippers indiscriminately, seriously wounding ten people. The attack occurred during evening prayer services in the Synagogue. This assault was followed by a copycat attack in Rostov-on-Don, where a local student attempted to attack worshippers at a local synagogue but was stopped by security guards. Charged with hooliganism, the student was eventually declared mentally unfit by a local court and was released after a period of mandated psychiatric treatment. 

On March 27, 2006, the Moscow City court sentenced Koptsev to 13 years in prison for attempted murder of two or more persons, but dropped the key charge of inciting inter-ethnic hatred. In September 2006, the same court added the hate crime charge in a retrial and increased Koptsev’s sentence to 16 years. Observers hailed the Russian courts’ handling of the Koptsev case as showing real progress by the Russian legal system in prosecuting anti-Semitic crimes.

In March 2006, FEOR protested the inclusion of openly xenophobic and anti-Semitic publishers in the 9th National Russian Book Fair as helping to sow anti-Semitic ideas in Russian culture.

In April 2006 (on Hitler’s birthday), skinheads vandalized a synagogue in Orenburg (the Urals) and a Jewish cemetery in Omsk (Siberia), and accosted Jews in Izhevsk and Rybinsk.

In June 2006, the Great Synagogue of Tomsk (also in Siberia) was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti after undergoing extensive renovations and repairs.

In July 2006, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) reported that a 22-year-old skinhead had planned to blow up the Saratov synagogue, but had escaped charges by voluntarily confessing to the police who had discovered his activities. Also in July, a group of Russian Orthodox believers reportedly attacked a group of Jews at a religion exhibit at the All-Russian Exhibition Center in Moscow, allegedly insisting that Jews ritually murdered Russia’s last Tsar.

In August 2006, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the Khabarovsk synagogue, which suffered only minor burn damage.

In September 2006, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, synagogues in Astrakhan and Khabarovsk were vandalized by rock-throwers, a Jewish school and a cemetery in Volgograd were vandalized and a Jewish congregation leader was attacked near his home in Moscow.

In October 2006, during Yom Kippur, a Jewish cemetery in Tver was vandalized and anti-Semitic fliers were distributed in the city, and a synagogue was vandalized in Vladivostok.

In November 2006, the Jewish community office in Surgut was fire-bombed and anti-Semitic fliers were found at the scene.

In December 2006, a note was discovered outside the Chabad house in Ulyanovsk that read, “We should kill the Jews or teach our children to kill them.” The note was attached to a tree by a swastika-engraved dagger. The Jewish community center in the same city was also vandalized the same month. Also in December, Friday night Hanukkah services in the Jewish community center in Pskov were disrupted when someone threw a tear gas canister inside.

In January 2007, a Jewish center in Murmansk was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti, and a Jewish center in Ulyanovsk was attacked and vandalized by drunken teenagers who shouted death threats and smashed windows before leaving. A Russian Jewish journalist and Israeli citizen working in Russia’s Far East, Konstantin Borovko, was killed during an apparent mugging outside a night club in Vladivostok the same month. Two Russian youths were arrested in March 2007 and charged in May 2007 with assault and manslaughter. Borovko had been working with JAFI and Hillel in Khabarovsk.

In February 2007, the Yekaterinburg Regional Court convicted five teenagers of murder motivated by ethnic hatred in the death of a Jewish man. In October 2005, the five had beaten and fatally stabbed the victim with a metal cemetery cross, while intoxicated. The court sentenced the five to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years.

In late February 2007, a leading Russian Muslim cleric called Israel a “malignant tumor” during a public rally in Moscow protesting Israeli excavation work near the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Mufti Nafigulla Ashirov, who serves as co-chair of the Russian Council of Muftis, one of Russia’s two official Muslim organizations, had previously charged Jews with conspiring to cause the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Russian Jewish leaders quickly condemned Ashirov’s comments, and the Council of Muftis expressed its regrets over his remarks and said it supported constructive dialogue between religions.

In March 2007, a synagogue in Vladivostok was vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans and swastikas a day before the start of Purim. The same synagogue was similarly attacked in October 2006. The Jewish cemetery in St. Petersburg was likewise vandalized in late March 2007 with swastikas and anti-Semitic signs. The same cemetery was repeatedly vandalized in October 2005. On the same day, a Holocaust memorial was vandalized in the Kaliningrad Jewish cemetery with swastikas and anti-Semitic insults.

Also in March 2007, a Moscow-area court sentenced a Moscow law student to 150 hours of public service for sending anti-Semitic text messages to a local television station in 2006, which then broadcast them.

Again in March 2007, local authorities reported vandalism at a Jewish cemetery and a synagogue in Voronezh, and suspected local skinheads were behind this and several earlier local instances of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2006 and 2007. Several foreign students in Voronezh were assaulted the same month. Authorities detained two local youths in early April 2007, and charged them with a hate crime in connection to cemetery vandalism committed in January and March 2007.

Also in March, aides to a Russian State Duma deputy were expelled from the Duma by its security staff for wearing swastika armbands. The parliamentarian, Nikolai Kuryanovich, a member of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, has a long history of anti-Semitic rhetoric and vocal support for nationalist extremists. The same month, a police captain in a district near St. Petersburg faced a charge of inciting ethnic hatred after placing anti-Semitic and anti-Caucasian materials on his personal website. The captain could be imprisoned from 2 to 4 years if charged and found guilty, but continues working in the meantime.

In April 2007, a Jewish teenager and his family fled their home after he was severely beaten by a neighbor in his village near Volgograd. Local activists appealed to authorities to protect the family. In Krasnodar, a regional court banned a local religious group that used a Nazi-style swastika and Nazi-style salutes in its ritual under Russian legislation that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols in any form and the public propaganda or display of Nazi or Nazi-like symbols. Two teenagers bearing Nazi-style tattoos were detained in Yekaterinburg under the same legislation the same month. Also in April 2007, the Duma (lower house of parliament) toughened criminal penalties for extremism, including raising fines for those selling or making products with Nazi symbols, and increasing prison sentences for persons desecrating graves or human remains. This legislation would allow authorities to more strongly prosecute anti-Semitic vandals in the future.

The same month, Russian neo-Nazis received official permission to hold a political rally to celebrate “freedom of choice” on April 21, 2007, which they used to mark Hitler’s birthday (April 20th). An estimated 350 extremists rallied in front of the presidential administration building in downtown Moscow on April 21, shouting neo-Nazi slogans and making Nazi salutes. There were no arrests, despite the fact that under Russian law, public incitement of ethnic hatred and the use of Nazi symbols are both illegal.

Also in April 2007, a statue of Lenin in Rostov-on-Don was vandalized with a Star of David on the eve of Lenin’s birthday. Some Russian nationalists have focused on Lenin’s mixed ancestry (his maternal grandfather was Jewish) as evidence of a “Jewish conspiracy against Russia,” given the pernicious effects of Bolshevik rule on 20th century Russia.

At the end of 2007, the SOVA center in Moscow, a hate crime monitoring organization, released its annual report, showing a decrease in the number of anti-Semitic incidents for the past year. This report also showed that Russia experienced a rise in extremist and nationalist acts overall in 2007. The SOVA center released a statement in February 2008 saying that January saw the greatest number of bias-motivated attacks recorded in a one month period in recent years.

In January 2008 the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia issued a statement expressing concern over a spate of attacks that month and commended law enforcement agencies for their prompt and effective response. On January 29, 2008, a group of more than ten members of the Russia All-National Movement attacked a synagogue and Jewish community center in Ulyanovsk. The attackers marked the walls with swastikas and other graffiti, shouted threats, and left behind pamphlets. No one was hurt in the incident. The police responded to the scene and detained four of the attackers. On January 27, 2008, unknown persons in Volgograd desecrated a Holocaust memorial for the 600 Jewish civilians shot there during the Nazi occupation. On January 23, 2008, three men broke into a synagogue in Nizhniy Novgorod and vandalized it. The men beat a guard who tried to detain them, and Police later arrested them. The Federation noted the positive actions by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and noted that "punishment for such crimes is becoming an increasingly realistic prospect."

On February 14, 2008, a joint study by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Jewish Congress found that many school history textbooks completely avoid the subject of the Holocaust despite the fact that the Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of Soviet Jews. Pogroms during the Russian Civil War were not mentioned in most textbooks. One textbook reportedly dramatically undercounted the number of Jews in the Russian empire in the 19th century, using the figure 175,000.

On March 20, 2008, hundreds of anti-Semitic announcements warning Russian parents to beware of the supposed Jewish practice of using children's blood to prepare Passover matzos were put up around the city of Novosibirsk in southwest Siberia.

On April 23, 2008, at a rally on Triumph Square in Moscow of around 400 far-right nationalists, speakers called for the murder of various government officials, praised terrorist methods, and demonized Jews. Members of the National Great Power Party of Russia, the Union of Orthodox Standard Bearers, and the neo-Nazi Slavic Union held signs condemning "Jewish fascism" and the "Jewish mafia," and calling on Slavic women to "guard the purity of your race.

On June 1, 2008, in Dzerzhinsk, unknown attackers threw a Molotov cocktail at the synagogue, starting a small fire outside the building. Also in June, a professor at a Tyumen University asserted her belief in the medieval accusation that Jews ritually murder Christian children and use their blood to bake matzos. Professor Svetlana Shestakovaya's lecture was part of the state-sponsored educational program "Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture," which has been introduced in schools in several regions, at times as part of the compulsory curriculum.

In terms of restitution, the Russian government has returned a small number of the Jewish buildings and synagogues previously confiscated under Soviet rule. The synagogue in Omsk, the largest in Siberia, was re-dedicated in May 1996 and the Russian government returned 61 Torah scrolls to the Jewish community in May 2000. In March 2001, however, Prime Minister Kasyanov ordered the government’s Restitution Commission to cease activities, ongoing since 1993. Sixteen religious books from the vast Schneerson Library were returned to a Lubavitch-run synagogue in Moscow in December 2002. The Chabad Lubavitch movement continues to seek the return of the entire Schneerson collection. In 2004, the Jewish community of Sochi, a popular Russian resort town on the Black Sea close to Georgia, received land from city officials to build a synagogue and community center, and Vladivostok city authorities returned a synagogue to the local community. In 2005, local officials returned buildings in Orenburg and Rostov-on-Don to local Jewish communities. 


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U.S. Policy  

During the 1990s, the U.S. Government made strenuous efforts to encourage Russian economic development and privatization, ensure continued arms reductions and integrate Russia into Western structures. Russia has become a member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), is on its way to becoming a full member of the G-8 nations and hopes to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). In addition to these current and potential economic and political coalitions, Russia has cooperated with NATO on several occasions relating to regional security, non-proliferation, peacekeeping and counter-terrorism. The formation of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002 reflects this increased cooperation. 

The reduction of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has been a continual focus of U.S.-Russian relations and treaties. The START II treaty, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1996 and the Russian Duma in 2000, updates the parameters for eventual nuclear disarmament and promotes nuclear non-proliferation. Both governments hope to formulate a START III treaty to take effect before START II expires in 2007.

George Bush Library

Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin signing START II Treaty, January 1993

The United States has developed specific programs, such as the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Initiative, to support the goals of nuclear disarmament and nuclear security in Russia. Congress appropriated $1.13 billion in 2002 to CTR programs, administered through the U.S. Department of Defense (also known as “Nunn-Lugar”). Since 1992, these programs have deactivated over 6,000 Soviet missile warheads, destroyed over 1,400 nuclear missiles and over 400 silos, and sealed nearly 200 nuclear test holes and other sites in Russia and the successor states. In a separate program, the U.S. Department of Energy – since 1994 – has already purchased over 175 tons of highly enriched uranium (equivalent to approximately 7,000 warheads) and converted it to reactor fuel for commercial use; nearly 325 tons remain.

Defense Department/U.S. Navy

1996: Dismantling Russian ballistic submarine under Cooperative Threat Reduction

President Bush ensured the release of another $450 million for 2003 to secure and disarm nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Russia. The U.S. National Academies and the Russian Academy of Sciences began working in 2003 on a joint project to reduce the risk posed by unsecured nuclear materials in Russia. 

The United States has also contributed substantial funds to encourage the continued involvement of Russia in the advancement of science and technology. In particular, the United States has financed Russia’s participation in the U.S-led international partnership to build the International Space Station (ISS). In this context, Russia has received $800 million in total since 1993. The Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI), established in 1998 by the United States and Russia, seeks to transition Russian scientists and engineers to peaceful research and applications, and to diversify the economies of Russian cities whose sole Soviet industry was nuclear development. The U.S. Department of Energy administered $21 million for the initiative in 2002.

U.S. policy toward Russia has remained committed to democracy, transparency and good governance, though funding has been reduced over the last several years. U.S. programs geared toward democracy building in Russia include the Russian Leadership Program (now called the Open World Program) administered by the U.S. Library of Congress. Initiated in 1999, Open World has hosted more than 5,000 Russian delegates engaged in political and legal careers by linking them to their counterparts in the United States, promoting themes such as economic development, federalism, education reform and the rule of law. 

Russian-American trade has risen steadily in recent years, with U.S. exports to Russia growing at an average of 20 percent annually for the past three years and reaching $4.7 billion in 2006. Foreign direct investment by American companies in Russia is now estimated at around $11 billion, or nearly twice as much as only three years ago.

The United States supports Russian accession to the World Trade Organization. In April 2007, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gutierrez said during a visit to Moscow that the United States was willing to lift the Jackson-Vanik amendment in the near future, and that the U.S. Congress could rescind the Soviet-era measure soon. The 1974 amendment restricted trade with the former Soviet Union over human rights violations, and has been a major bilateral irritant in U.S.-Russian relations after the fall of communism. Given recent political disagreements between the U.S. and Russia, it is unlikely Russia will be graduated from the Jackson-Vanik amendment in the near future. 

Despite this extensive economic support, Russia and the United States do not always agree on issues regarding domestic and international policy. Russia firmly opposed the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in December 2001 and has objected to U.S. proposals for a Nuclear Missile Defense (NMD) system. Moreover, it vocally criticized the characterization of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil” by the Bush administration in 2002. This opposition carried through the UN Security Council debate leading up to Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq, exposing the deepest rift in U.S.-Russian relations since Putin took office. 

The United States – under both the Clinton and Bush administrations – has been critical of Russia’s military campaign in Chechnya and the growing threats to free speech and an independent media in Russia, relating to reporting on Chechnya in particular. Washington expressed concern in the cases of NTV founder Vladimir Gusinsky and Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky. Babitsky was kidnapped in Chechnya, detained without notice for several weeks by Russian forces and eventually tried, convicted, and released on charges of using false documents. More recently, Washington has expressed concern about the removal of American citizen Boris Jordan from the head post of NTV. In the fall of 2002, President Putin also stripped Radio Liberty of its special privileges for reporting in Russia—a response to its critical broadcasting, often in minority languages, in the North Caucasus. The Kremlin’s claim that, since September 2001, Russians and Americans are fighting the same enemy—whether in Chechnya or Afghanistan—has met with limited success in the West.

Ron Sachs /CNP

Russian Jewish leaders meeting with Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) in U.S. Capitol, May 2001

Washington has been concerned about the proliferation of Russian military technology and material to Iran. U.S. proliferation fears were compounded by the 2001 visit to Moscow by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, when Putin agreed to sell additional weaponry to Iran. Russia agreed in June 2003 to halt further nuclear fuel shipments to Iran, and has been developing plans to buy spent nuclear fuel from Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, to prevent their development of nuclear weapons. However, Russia’s plan to enrich uranium for Iran on its soil fell through. In March 2006, the UN Security Council officially called on Iran to suspend all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities in an effort to guarantee that its nuclear program is for exclusively peaceful purposes. In September 2008, Russia joined the U.S. in voting for a U.N. resolution calling on Iran to comply with previous demands to suspend uranium enrichment. 

Congress has held hearings and passed numerous resolutions on Chechnya, press freedom, the 1997 Religion Law, anti-Semitism, weapons proliferation and other Russia-related concerns. President Bush announced his intention in November 2001 to work for Russia’s “graduation” from the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, and the United States has certified Russia as a “market economy.” However, subsequent poultry and other trade disputes, uncertainty regarding the terms for Russia’s eventual WTO ascension, and growing criticism of President Putin’s foreign and domestic policies have kept Congress from moving to graduate Russia. Russia’s Jewish community leaders have lobbied Washington to graduate Russia from Jackson-Vanik, including Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar during his March 2007 visit to Washington.

In late 2000 and early 2001, U.S.-Russian relations were weighed down by a series of espionage cases, beginning with the uncovering of FBI agent Robert Hanssen’s long-term and high-level spying for Moscow and the resulting large-scale reciprocal expulsion of Russian and American diplomats. This was followed by the Russian detentions of American businessman Edmund Pope on espionage charges and of American Fulbright scholar John Tobin initially on drug-related and then espionage charges. Both Pope and Tobin were later released and returned to the United States.

After over a year of leveling accusations of incompetence and espionage against Peace Corps volunteers, and having denied them visa extensions, Russia announced the official expulsion of the Peace Corps in December 2002. Acknowledging the benefits of the Peace Corps’ 12-year stay there, the Russian government explained that the country’s new economic and political situation no longer requires such assistance. 

Despite continued disagreement on Chechnya, NATO expansion and the Iraq crisis, the United States and Russia have continued to collaborate on significant counter-terrorism efforts and have participated in several summits. Bush and Putin have held many bilateral meetings, including: Ljubljana, Slovenia in June 2001; the United States in November 2001; Russia in May 2002; Russia in May/June 2003, and in the United States in September 2003; Bratislava, Slovakia in February 2005; during the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006; and Hanoi, Vietnam in November 2006. During these meetings, the United States and Russia have discussed a wide range of security, counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, trade and many other issues. At NATO’s latest summit in December 2008, Membership Action Plans were not issued to Ukraine and Georgia. Russia believes MAPs should not be extended to these countries, while the U.S. believes Ukraine and Georgia need to become members of NATO in the immediate future. 

Beginning in 2005 and accelerating in 2006 and 2007, U.S.-Russia relations appeared to worsen as American observers decried what was widely seen as the Putin administration’s increasing authoritarianism at home and assertiveness abroad, in counterpoint to rising Russian complaints about the Bush administration’s alleged preference for unilateralism and militarism, and failure to end Soviet-era trade restrictions. Washington’s recent concerns include the perceived erosion of Yeltsin-era political, economic and civil freedoms in Russia, highlighted by a number of mysterious deaths of oppositionists and critics at home and abroad, by the Khodorkovsky/YUKOS affair, and by restrictive new registration requirements for Russia’s many NGOs; Russia’s refusal to end nuclear technology and conventional arms transfers to Iran and Russian opposition to U.S. attempts to pressure Iran to end its nuclear program; Russia’s continued pressure on pro-Western but vulnerable neighbors such as Georgia and Ukraine and Russian moves to end the post-9/11 U.S. presence in Central Asia; and Russia’s increasing willingness to manipulate deliveries of its vast oil and gas supplies to European customers for political purposes, as well as new Russian restrictions on foreign companies seeking to invest in and develop Russia’s energy sector.

American plans to build limited missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic provoked a particularly sharp Russian response reminiscent of the pointed debates over NATO expansion a decade earlier. Likewise, persistent Russian and Western differences over the future status of Kosovo resembled earlier East/West clashes over Serbia, Bosnia and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.

Then President Putin’s stridently anti-U.S. speech at a security conference in Munich, Germany in February 2007 was the strongest expression to date of Russian dissatisfaction with American policy and direction, leading some observers to declare that the post-Soviet “honeymoon” between Russia and the West is now over. Many now predict the start of yet another period of strategic competition and realpolitik friction between what some now call “resurgent Russia” and a United States whose post-Cold War global predominance is now seen to be eroding. Although Russian officials quickly downplayed Putin’s Munich remarks as, in the words of the Russian Foreign Minister, “more a cold shower than a cold war,” Putin’s speech appeared to many to set a new benchmark for U.S.-Russian relations. In this view, U.S.-Russian bilateral relations in the future will likely be a “Cold Peace,” a relationship more complex and productive than during the Cold War, and one in which Russia will be both friend and foe, partner and rival, but which will fall far short of the optimistic “strategic partnership” goals of the immediate post-Soviet period. 

Over the past year, the U.S. has had a tumultuous relationship with Russia due to several flash points, such as the conflict with Georgia and differences in policies with Iran. On November 5, 2008, President Medvedev gave his first address to the federal assembly, with a strong negative message about the current state of U.S.-Russia relations. Since then, he and other Russian officials have expressed an optimistic message that the new U.S. administration will positively impact the bilateral relationship between the two countries.

St. Petersburg, June 2003: Presidents Bush and Putin exchanging the instruments of ratification for the treaty reducing strategic offensive forces Russia - Presidential Press Service

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