The Russian Investigative Committee's ‘Jewish problem’

It’s a week to raise an eyebrow at Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee, after a spokesperson told a religious conference on Monday that the agency will reexamine the 1918 execution of Russia’s last tsar and his family to determine if it was a “ritual killing.” The announcement follows remarks by a Russian Orthodox bishop that “a significant part of the church commission has no doubt that this murder was ritualistic.”

The willingness of the Russian Orthodox Church and federal government to entertain notions that the tsar may have been murdered in a ritual killing has concerned Jewish organizations in Russia, where anti-Semitic groups have long blamed Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution, claiming that they executed the tsar and his family and “used their blood” for ritual purposes.

Now the long-time head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, has come under fire for allegedly using anti-Semitic slurs when speaking to Ekaterina Nosyreva-Grishina, a major cases official in Novosibirsk, about charges against Leonid Volkov, the man now running Alexey Navalny’s presidential campaign.

In a Facebook post this Tuesday, Volkov summarized an incident described to him in August 2015, when he was charged with a felony crime for supposedly attacking a journalist. Fifteen months later, Volkov was ultimately convicted of a lesser offense and fined 30,000 rubles (about $500), but it wasn’t until this fall that his conviction was finally expunged. Nosyreva-Grishina, moreover, finally retired, and so Volkov says he now feels comfortable revealing what he says she told him more than two years ago: Alexander Bastrykin pressured her to lock him up, though she decided merely to force Volkov to agree not to leave “the area” (which included Novosibirsk, Kostroma, and Moscow).

According to Volkov, Bastrykin also unleashed an anti-Semitic tirade, telling Nosyreva-Grishina: “They say this young little Jew from Luxembourg came here to stage a revolution. That he got itchy feet over there. We went through all this 100 years ago, when they sent us the sealed train of Jews from Switzerland. You, Ms. Nosyreva-Grishina, must understand that all these people are enemies of the Russian people.”

Volkov says he didn’t understand why Nosyreva-Grishina would divulge this information until he asked her what she told Bastrykin after the rant. “What was I supposed to tell him?” she answered. “That my maiden name is Ginsburg?”