Many Russian dissidents embrace liberal values while fully subscribing to a racist view of the world.
In July, Uzbekistan-born, Russian-speaking Israeli writer Dina Rubina gave an interview to the Russian opposition channel Rain TV, which caused a stir in the Russophone world. During the hour-and-a-half programme, she declared that there are no “peaceful residents” in Gaza, Israel has the right to “cleanse Gaza and turn it into a parking lot”, and that Palestinians need to be “dissolved in hydrochloric acid”.
Self-exiled journalist and producer Mikhail Kozyrev, who interviewed Rubina, decided to take out these bits, calling them “the most complex part” of the interview. Although he appeared to question Rubina on the claim that there are no “peaceful residents in Gaza” by comparing it to the collective blame Russians face over the war in Ukraine, he did not reject her claims and himself took a clear pro-Israel stance throughout his conversation with her.
And while many Russian speakers condemned Rubina – especially in Central Asia where her book talks were cancelled – there were many among Russia’s political emigres who supported her, did not condemn her openly, or maintained her words were taken out of context.
This incident is not an aberration. Many in the Russian liberal opposition, which now operates mostly in exile, unquestioningly support Israel. This is not only due to their tendency to disregard institutionalised racism in Russia but also due to their embrace of a civilisational hierarchy narrative that places the white West at the top. Anti-Palestinian bias is a natural outcome of this worldview.
Examples of the Russian opposition’s virulent anti-Palestinianism abound. Yuliya Latynina, a star columnist living in exile, has made parallels between “barbarians” destroying “blossoming civilisations” and the Palestinians and called students protesting against the genocide in Gaza “lazy and stupid”.
Another self-exiled liberal commentator, Leonid Gozman, has claimed that European countries that voted at the United Nations in favour of a “pro-Hamas” resolution calling for a truce in Gaza did so because they were “afraid of their immigrant communities”.
Andrei Pivovarov, former director of Open Russia, a now-defunct pro-democracy organisation, has said he finds Israel’s actions in Gaza “justified”. He was imprisoned in Russia until he was released last year in a prisoner exchange with the West.
Russian opposition politician, Dmitri Gudkov, currently residing in Bulgaria, has declared: “For me, Israel is the embodiment of civilisation. Anything against it is barbarism.”
Kseniya Larina, a renowned Russian journalist and radio host, also currently in exile, has hosted on her show Israeli Russian-speaking intellectuals multiple times. In one instance, a talk with an Israeli educator was titled, “Recognition of Palestine is not antisemitism, it’s idiocy”.
These are just a few examples of the many Russian liberal emigres who openly supported Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. In addition, Russian pop icons, comedians, musicians, and TV personalities who are based in Israel or visit also constantly broadcast the Israeli narrative.
Popular Russian oppositional media outlets – the Nobel Prize recipient newsletter Novaya Gazeta, Meduza publication outlet, and TV Rain – disproportionately feature pro-Israeli news with little counter-narrative offered. As a result, racist, anti-Palestinian rhetoric thrives in Russian-language social and traditional media.
The roots of this pro-Israeli stance among Russia’s liberals – who make up the majority of the Russian opposition – go back to the 20th century.
The Jewish people were persecuted by the Tsarist regime during the Russian Empire, which the Bolsheviks initially denounced. But the communist regime itself eventually embraced anti-Semitic views under Joseph Stalin. Discrimination against Jews continued, and it peaked during 1951-53, when Stalin accused a group of Jewish doctors of conspiracy against the state and launched a campaign of persecution. Even after the Communist Party dropped the accusations, Jews continued to be subject to forced assimilation and structural discrimination.
Within this context, the emerging liberal opposition of the 1980s came to perceive Israel as a protector of the victimised Jewish community and a democratic, liberal state, part of the West.
In parallel, there was an immigration wave towards Israel, which was seen as a place of safety for Soviet opposition figures. This also fed into an unconditional allegiance to Israel and Zionism among dissidents, which was inherited by subsequent generations of the liberal opposition.
The pro-Israel bias of the Russian opposition intensified even more after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sent hundreds of thousands of opposition-minded Russians fleeing abroad. Israel has been one of the main destinations; by some estimates, in 2022 alone, some 70,000 Russians moved there, compared with 27,000 in 2021, contributing to a total of about 1.3 million Russian-speakers in Israel.
The paradox here is that the Russian liberal opposition maintains that it is the democratic, moral alternative to President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism while openly expressing racist views against the Palestinians. It largely condemns Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Russian war crimes, but denies the Israeli ones.
In the West, the self-declared democratic values of the Russian opposition are rarely scrutinised. But they should be, because it is not just in relation to Palestine that its racist views are apparent.
In the past, liberal opposition figures have frequently reproduced Kremlin-style narratives about migrants, Muslims, and other racialised people. For example, the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny, once hailed as Russia’s democratic hope, referred to migrants from the Caucasus as “cockroaches” and “flies” in a 2007 video on “How to fight insects”. In 2021, these and other statements led Amnesty International to revoke his prisoner of conscience status; the organisation later apologised and continued to advocate for him until his death in custody.
In April this year, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the vice president of the Free Russia Foundation, claimed that soldiers from Russia’s minorities have an easier time killing Ukrainians than ethnic Russian soldiers do. The statement was seen as an attempt to blame war crimes on racialised minorities and prompted an open letter from the Indigenous of Russia Foundation denouncing it.
These attitudes expressed by Navalny and Kara-Murza are not exceptional. The Russian liberal opposition rarely, if ever, condemns discrimination or racist violence against minorities in Russia. Last year, when activist Rifat Dautov died in custody from apparent torture in the Bashkortostan region, there was almost no reaction from the exiled opposition communities. By contrast, when several weeks later, Navalny died of suspected poisoning in prison, the eulogies and mourning lasted for months.
This reflects a longstanding pattern within Russian liberalism: claiming moral superiority over the Kremlin while sharing the same problematic and prejudiced thinking. The truth is, even if Putin’s regime were to fall tomorrow and this opposition come to power, it is unlikely that it would carry out any major reforms to remove structural racism. The concerns of peripheralised regions that seek greater autonomy within Russia, non-Russian ethnic people, and Indigenous and migrant populations in Russia, do not seem to trouble Russia’s liberal opposition.
It is no wonder the Russian liberal opposition tries to blame Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Putin. It does not want the war to be seen as a direct continuation of Russia’s and the erstwhile USSR’s longstanding expansionist politics and drive to subjugate peoples perceived as lesser.
While in the case of Ukraine, Russian liberals are able to hide behind their opposition to the war, in the case of Palestine, they are exposed.
What Palestinians face today – dehumanisation, dispossession, and denial of existence – mirrors what many racialised and Indigenous people within Russia have long endured. Yet the Russian opposition remains blind to these experiences and continues to see itself as the sole victim of Russian authoritarianism.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect media’s editorial policy.
