‘May the lord bless and keep the tsar …’

Readers here undoubtedly will know the rest of this line of shtetl folk wisdom from Tevye the Dairyman in “Fiddler on the Roof”: “May the lord bless and keep the tsar… far away from us.” When those of us who can trace ancestry in the Russian empire consider tsardom, what commonly comes to mind are the infamous Odessa and Warsaw pogroms of 1881, the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the larger Odessa pogrom of 1905, and several other outrages. They are key parts in our families’ immigration stories, and accordingly, we don’t think of the olden-day tsars or their modern counterparts as benign.

That history apparently has been lost on President Donald Trump, who decided to welcome the Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin to our country in mid-August, literally rolling out the red carpet for him in Anchorage, Alaska, and playing up to him as a personal buddy, well beyond what any potential diplomacy might require.

The big gap between our attitude toward Putin and that of Mr. Trump certainly is not lost on Ukraine’s Jewish citizens and its Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who are increasingly concerned with their country’s very survival. Rabbi Yosef Wolff of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson told reporters last month that his remaining flock is “on the front line…If somebody’s shooting from the other side, it takes maybe five seconds to arrive.” Jewish life continues there, we are told, as well as among the 20,000 Jewish residents of Odesa, where, like in most other parts of the country, deadly drone strikes, military casualties, and the frequent loss of electricity caused by Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure have become routine. Tens of thousands of other Jewish Ukrainians, like their non-Jewish countrymen, have also been driven into exile by the carnage. The first months of the Russian-initiated war added insult to injury for Ukraine’s Jews; the Kremlin’s missiles and shells directed at the capital in Kyiv rained down on the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial site there, the largest Jewish mass grave of the Nazi era.

As Putin has pushed his war on Ukraine further and further, he and his close associates have injected notes of increasingly open antisemitism into their propaganda. Last winter, Putin expanded his attacks, moving beyond personal slanders on President Zelenskyy to denunciations of “ethnic Jews … people without kin or memory, with no roots.” Such a remark should chill anyone with a bit of knowledge of the history of antisemitic persecutions done by the dictator Joseph Stalin, who infamously libeled Soviet Jewish citizens as “rootless cosmopolitans.”

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What makes Putin a tsar? Formally holding the office of President of Russia continuously, except for a brief period, since 2000, Putin already has outlasted the rule of many tsars; a constitutional amendment he engineered a few years ago would allow him to rule until 2036, when he would be 84. There is no question that the Russian presidency under Putin has become personal rule, with various political opponents and potentially powerful business leaders imprisoned or dying under suspicious circumstances when they were on the outs with the leader.

Putin has revived the historic alliance between the Russian state and the Orthodox church, forging close ties with Moscow Patriarch Kirill, who endorsed Putin for his 2012 reelection as “a miracle from God.” Kirill blessed the invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war” against Western “Satanism” and even sanctified gifts for Russian military commanders. Their shared foundation is Great Russian nationalism, a legacy of empire that survived the Soviet era. Both see Russkiy Mir (the nation) — including Ukraine and Belarus — as under Moscow’s rightful sway, with Putin further projecting a sphere of influence to include other former tsarist colonies. The Moscow Patriarchy has even floated a plan to grow Russia’s population to 600 million, in line with imperial ambitions.

Great Russian nationalism historically has meant suppression of all the smaller nations of the tsarist empire, as well as minority ethnic groups like Jews. During the 3 1/2 years of the Russian war on Ukraine, concern has mounted not only for Ukrainian Jews, but also for the remaining Jews of Russia, who sometimes have been used by Russian rulers as pawns in times of crisis and conflict. In 2022, Pinchas Goldschmidt, who served nearly 30 years as chief rabbi of Moscow, advised Jewish Russians to leave the increasingly intolerant country for their own safety.

Where will our country’s relations with Tsar Putin wind up? For Ukrainians? For ourselves? President Trump’s remarks immediately following his Alaska meeting with Putin were not encouraging for Ukrainians: He walked back his prior assurance that a ceasefire could be achieved and suggested that it’s up to Ukraine, the victim country, to sacrifice more of its territory to appease the Kremlin. Perhaps things looked a little better on the following Monday, after the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, NATO, and the European Union showed up in Washington to demonstrate solidarity with Ukraine and President Zelensky.

Of additional concern is what Trump’s continued bromance with Putin may mean for our own country. The president told Fox News that the Russian leader suggested we get rid of mail-in voting in the U.S., which would allow us to have “honest elections.” Modeling himself on Putin, Trump boasted that he was preparing to implement such an attack on voting rights by presidential order. Of course, Vladimir Putin knows all about “honest elections,” having managed to conduct several in Russia that generally were understood to have included widespread ballot-box stuffing and other irregularities, even after he had opposition candidates arrested or disqualified from running under various pretexts.

Since April, millions of Americans have taken to the streets in successive protests against the authoritarian actions characterizing Trump’s new term in office, rallying under the banner of “No Kings.” This is in keeping with our American anti-monarchy traditions, which go back to 1776. Public protests are something we still can do here, unlike in Russia. The recent Trump-Putin meeting makes me think that maybe we just weren’t speaking the right language. To avoid any doubt, our future protests should say, “No kings! No tsars! … Nyet!”

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.