Krasny and Kagan and the smear campaign

A prominent member of the Russian Jewish community shared with me on background his anguish about the Alec Brook-Krasny--Ari Kagan race. His words were harsh toward both candidates, but, it seems to me, reflective of an ambivalence that is growing in the community as the election draws near.

My source said, "A lot of people are celebrating that we will finally elect nash (one of us) to higher office, but I dont feel like either of these guys represents me. It turns out that during their former lives one of them (Kagan) was a Communist and may well have been a KGB informer--because how else could a Jew get into a high political/military school to which very few Jews were accepted--and the other one (Krasny) was apparently a speculant or fartsovchik (underground trader in western goods). Normally, I would prefer a speculant to a Communist, but often speculants also had to inform on others in order for the authorities to allow him to go on operating. So I believe that neither of these two guys comes to this election with clean hands and I really dont know whom to vote for. I wish the first Russian Jew to be elected was someone from the next generation--someone who came to New York at the age of 10 or so and therefore had no chance to be soiled by life in the Soviet Union."


In publishing the above comments here, I hasten to add that I have no idea if either Kagan or Krasny did anything disreputable in their former lives in the Soviet Union. Part of me doesn't really want to know, as I like both of them personally very much. In fact, for a long time I felt that these questions were smear tactics and had no place in the campaign at all, so avoided writing about them. The point, though, is that the charges have been raised by both candidates against each other--and the charges are being avidly discussed in the community--so to pretend they are not a factor in the campaign's final days would be putting one's head in the ground. Also, how people respond to these charges is serving as a Rohrsbach test as to their attitudes toward their own pasts and the country they thought they had left behind, but which in many ways has followed them here.

Kagan opened the barrage by criticizing Krasny's involvement last year in efforts to build stronger ties between the Russian-speaking community here and the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, which struck me as a legitimate issue to raise, given that some of his Krasny's backers in the community have extensive business ties with Russia, are engaged in promoting cultural events here with the musical, dance and theater stars from Russia. This is all very relevant given the Putin government's sustained efforts to strengthen its ties with "Russian compatriots" abroad as part of a PR effort to clean its image in the West at a time that it has cut back radically on democratic freedoms at home. I have written, though, that the charge from the Kagan camp that Krasny is a "fifth column" for Putin is a repellent one and obviously false to boot. Promoting stronger ties with Russia in the declared hope that country will stop giving nuclear material to Iran and will draw closer to Israel and the US is a far cry from serving as an agent of Putin.

Now Krasny has hit back hard with these personal charges about Kagan's past, which from my soundings in the community have caused a lot of people to redouble their support for Kagan, pointing out that almost all Soviet citizens, including Jews, had to pay obeisance to the system if they wanted to get ahead. The only pure ones were the Prisoners of Zion and refuseniks, people who took great risks and sometimes were brutally punished for having the guts to break fully with the system. Yet as Mark Handelman, the former head of NYANA once said in another context, American Jews had a false expectation of Russian Jews that they were all either Bubbe (a Yiddische grandmother) or Natan Sharansky. Very very few people, very very few Jews were Natan Sharansky. Most did what they needed to do to have a decent life against great odds in an anti-Semitic country. I suspect that if I had grown up as a Soviet Jew, I would have done similar things, so dont feel comfortable criticizing people for acts taken under duress.

Yet if many people are dismissing the charges against Kagan as unfair and Mc Carthyistic, others--including people I respect in the community--have told me they are deeply disturbed by these revelations about Kagan's career in the Lvov Higher Military and Political School, and by letters in Metro Magazine from former classmates about his time there. Sure Kagan needed to become a party member to be able to serve as a journalist in the Soviet military, but given that it was already the late 1980's, it does seem to have been rather late in the day for someone of integrity to have been avidly pursuing a career in the Soviet military and Communist Party. There were other options by that time.

To be sure, Ari was a very young man at that time and the temptation is to say that his distant past should not be held against him. He has done many good things since arriving in New York, including serving as a journalistic fighter for justice on behalf of poor and elderly members of the community living in wretched housing and mistreated by insensitve bureaucrats. Isnt all of that more relevant to next Tuesday's election than what he did back in the 1980's? I believe so, but the problem is that even if Kagan is elected, as appears increasingly possible, the suspicions will not go away. I suspect that if Kagan wins and wishes to advance further in politics, he will need at some point to give a fuller accounting of that period of his life, as may also be the case with Krasny if he wins, vis a vis the nature of his business activities during his last years in Moscow.

It IS interesting that the candidate who chose to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the late 1980's is now the one who is most ardent about resisting efforts by the Putin regime to build ties with the Russian-speaking community here. There is a certain uncompromising, single-minded quality in evidence here which seems to have served Ari Kagan very well in his career both in the Soviet Union and since arriving here. By compoarison, Krasny is more of a compromiser and a networker, but leaves many people wondering whether he retains core principles he will not sell to the highest bidder.

In the end, the policy differences between the two candidates appear less than substantial; both promise to make priorities of issues like housing, fighting crime, protecting social welfare benefits and building ties between the Russian community and other 46th District constituencies like blacks and Pakistanis. Both are avid supporters of Israel. So for many people in the community, the 'Russia issue' in all of its complexity, may be what determines whether they vote for Ari Kagan or Alec Brook-Krasny.