Attacks on Christians and Jews in Dagestan worry Russia

Islamist extremists killed at least 21 people in coordinated attacks against minority Christians and Jews in Russia’s southernmost, multiethnic but mainly Muslim republic of Dagestan on Sunday – the third major terrorist incident in Russia in as many months, according to the government.

Sunday’s deadly attacks appear to have been directed equally against the republic’s small communities of Jews and Orthodox Christians. The attackers struck a police station and four places of worship in two Dagestani cities, demonstratively executing an Orthodox priest and burning down the only synagogue in the ancient city of Derbent. Last October, rioters at the airport in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala, unsuccessfully tried to storm an airliner that had just arrived from Tel Aviv in what was widely viewed as an antisemitic reaction to the war in Gaza.

Leaders of both groups were quick to point to a wider threat to Russia’s social stability.

The attackers’ “undoubted goal is to kindle the flames of hostility, to sow the seeds of hatred and mutual hostility,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill told journalists. “The future of Russia largely depends on suppressing attempts to radicalize religious life and all manifestations of extremism and ethnic hatred.”

The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, Rabbi Alexander Boroda, similarly warned that singling out places of worship threatens to raise social tensions. “People start to be afraid, stop trusting each other. This generates hatred and aggression, which undermines harmony in society and poisons relations between people.”

Russian society seems quite stable on the surface. The country is overwhelmingly secular. Almost 80% of Russians are Slavs, most self-identifying as Orthodox Christians, although most say that they seldom go to church. 

There are around 100 other ethnic groups, and three other recognized state religions – Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam – which in some places constitute local majorities in 21 ethnic republics spread across the country. About 18% of Russians are Muslim, but they are mostly concentrated in several republics, including Dagestan, one of the poorest, and Tatarstan, one of the richest.

Some analysts worry that violent Islamist extremism may be reviving after nearly two decades of relative quiescence following Russia’s suppression of Islamist rebellion in the Caucasus republic of Chechnya in the early 2000s. During the previous decade, thousands died in Moscow and other cities across Russia, in airliner bombings, apartment explosions, sieges of a school and a theater, metro bombings, and other attacks by Chechen-linked militants.

Barely three months ago, Islamist extremists struck a Moscow concert venue, killing 130 people. Moscow rhetorically blames the attack on Ukraine and the West but admits it was actually carried out by Tajik citizens linked to the international organization known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), which is based in Afghanistan and has been declared a terrorist group by Moscow. Earlier this month, ISIS-linked prisoners took two guards hostage in a southern Russian jail, leading to a special services assault that killed six.

Grigory Shvedov, editor of The Caucasian Knot, which produces independent reporting from the wider Caucasus region, says that the Ukraine war is one factor in the emerging trend, perhaps because security services are distracted. But the war in Gaza has also seriously riled up populations in heavily Muslim regions, especially more impoverished and tradition-minded places like Dagestan.

“People are watching the news daily and seeing what is happening in the Gaza war, and when these attacks against Jews occur, they approve of it,” he says. “The riot at the airfield last October was unarmed, but the attacks against the synagogues last weekend were with deadly force, and people were killed. This is a new target, and I guess it’s because ISIS and local Islamists perceive that this is a vulnerable issue, and the public mood will support attacks on synagogues.”

Though interethnic strife tends to be rare, hostility toward Russia’s large communities of migrant workers, who tend to be mostly Muslims from former-Soviet Central Asia, has been on the rise since the Moscow attack by Tajik citizens in March.

“In our surveys, we note an increase in public concern about becoming victims of a terrorist attack,” says Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling agency. “Popular dislike of migrant workers is always high, but the fear of interethnic tensions within Russia is still minor, though growing somewhat.”