Igor Shafarevich - Accusations of Antisemitism

Accusations of Antisemitism

Shafarevich's essays titled Russophobia and "Three thousand year old mystery" (Трехтысячелетняя загадка) resulted in accusations of antisemitism. He completed the Russophobia essay in 1982 and it was initially circulated in samizdat. In the USSR it was first published in 1989.

In the Russophobia essay, referring to Augustin Cochnin's opinions, he argued that great nations experience periods in their history when reformist elitist groups ('small nations') that have values that differ fundamentally from the values of the majority of the people, gain upper hand in the society. Yitzhak M. Brudny writes that, in Shafarevich's opinion, Jews represented such a 'small nation' in Russia, and they were full of hatred against traditional Russian way of life, first playing an active role in the terrorist regime of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and then, during the Perestroika era, trying to implant into Russia the liberal values of the Western world.

Its publication led to a request by the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to Shafarevich to resign his membership, because the NAS charter prohibited stripping an existing membership. In an open letter to the NAS, Shafarevich denied that Russophobia is antisemitic.

Accusations of anti-semitism have continued, involving Shafarevich's other publications. Semyon Reznik targets the Russophobia essay for its factual inaccuracies, and argues that Shafarevich depicts the murder of Tsar Nicholas II as an example of Jewish ritual murder, and further claims that Shafarevich has assigned Jewish ethnicity to a number of non-Jewish individuals involved in the execution, perpetuating the false assertion that there was graffiti in Yiddish at the murder site, Aron Katsenelinboigen, on the other hand, stated that while there are anti-semitic claims in Shafarevich's writings, he stops short of claiming blood libel.

More recently Shafarevich expanded on his views in his book "Three thousand year old mystery". This work was published in Russian in 2002; an introductory section explains the relationship with the Russophobia essay, explaining that the essay developed from an Appendix to an intended work of wider scope which he started writing in samizdat. In her book "The Vexing Case of Igor Shafarevich, a Russian Political Thinker" (2012) Krista Berglund argues that the allegations about anti-Semitism in Shafarevich’s writings is unfounded, and that the consequent damage to his reputation was built on a false claims.