I will begin with a statement which might just eclipse the ingenious assertion of the perestroika that “there is no sex in Russia”: there is no modern, living, vivifying Jewish culture in Russia. There are cultural centers (at least there is one in Moscow; the rest with what probably is recognition of their limited capabilities call themselves community centers); there are cultural events; there are even some Jews left – but no Jewish culture. In fact, the notion of “Jewish culture” is an anachronism, arriving no earlier than the mid-nineteenth century, when due to (or despite) the efforts of the romantically inclined Haskala agents and the Zionist movement, primarily in Eastern Europe, the notion of “tradition” split into two elements – “culture” and “religion”. Religion inherited the rituals, the customs, and the laws – in other words, the halakha. It developed a party of advocates – the orthodoxy. Culture appropriated (or rather, emancipated) the spiritual achievements, translated into European categories – the literature, the art, the music, the folklore. The most prominent ideologists of Jewish culture were Akhad ha-Am, C. N. Byalik, I. L. Perets, C. Zhitlovsky, S. An-sky and others. Naturally, within the culture wars of languages, ideologies, and worldviews began. However, history (mass emigration, the Russian revolution, the Holocaust, the creation of the state of Israel) set everything right. In today’s globalized world, Jewish culture (hereafter – JC), like the notion of “national culture” in general, is an archaism, preserved from the Romanticism and the times of national emancipation and self-identification. Today it is more of a historical concept, used in the sense of “heritage”. In any case, JC in today’s Russia (and the rest of the FSU) resembles a flea-market, which in its essence is an ordered kind of junkyard. A flea-market, like any market, has its sellers and buyers.
There are four main types of buyers:

1. “Dandies” who have chosen vintage as a lifestyle and style of behavior, demonstrating, in their view, an inner freedom, a difference, or even a cultural protest. All typical for youth and passes with age.
2. Artists, scouring the market for a. – creative material and b. – inspiration. Accidental purchases change their shape and/or meaning at the artist’s fancy.
3. Collectors, obvious enough. Their market finds go into glass cases and folders, are sorted etc., forever stripped of utilitarian meaningful value and turned into memorials of themselves.
4. Poor folk, unable to afford proper goods from shops and resorting therefore to used items.

There are two types of sellers:

1. The profiteer, buying and reselling other people’s things. Occupies the lowest step in the hierarchy of businessmen. One may sometimes encounter hucksters who know something about antiques, but anyway most of them are swindlers.
2. The average Joe, usually a chance seller, parting with various rubbish-stuffs out of poverty or for lack of need. Generally has no idea about the real value of his merchandise.

There are also occasional accidental tourists, but they do not count. At any rate, the flea-market is the past personified, relating to the present only in the context of buying and selling.
The notion of “culture” has many definitions, all of which more or less boil down to some simple diagram (general enough, like every diagram). Every culture, including the Jewish, has three realms:

1. The material – production, technology, work tools, dwelling, clothing, weaponry, and so on and so forth.
2. The social – public relations, type of political government, legal and moral regulations, types of administration, and styles of leadership.
3. The spiritual – learning, art, literature, religion, mythology, and philosophy.

These three realms in conjunction form a special – cultural – environment (a discourse, if you will), which, on the one hand, is formed and supported by the collective effort and will of a certain group, but on the other hand it exists regardless of the will of an individual, a given member of the group. Inclusion in this environment is dependent not on the psychological and physiological qualities of the individual, but rather on the possession of a set of cultural codes, or a language, containing symbols, signs, behavior norms, and life aims understood by all members of the culture. This can be called the worldview, and it is the fourth and probably the most important component of the concept of culture.
In the reality of modern Diaspora, the cultural environment may and should be incorporated (but not assimilated!) into the environment of the dominant culture. It is according to this definition that I claim that Russia lacks Jewish culture, as there exists no conjunction of three realms, nor even less so a unity of worldview. I will try to demonstrate articulately.

Material culture
It is as funny as it is preposterous to speak today of a production and technology culture within one national culture. What could be said? That the production of prayer shawls, jackets, fur hats, candlesticks, mezuzahs, Passover trays, Kiddush goblets, yarmulkes, hats, wigs, as well as kosher food, is either ridiculously small or nonexistent in Russia. To be serious, this context (and the context of modern culture in general) allows for discussion of consumption instead of production. It is no secret that the above-listed items are excluded from the average Russian Jew’s (in any definition whatsoever) basket of goods. No demand – no supply. Say, Moscow has only two or three kosher restaurants and scarcely any specialized shops. Whatever for? It is costly for both the client and the owner. There are scarcely even plain restaurants with traditional Jewish cuisine, as opposed to Azerbaijani, Georgian, Uzbek, Lebanese, Italian, Japanese, etc. There used to be an Israeli menu on offer at the Bilingua club, but it disappeared after a fire. The general restaurant/culinary lexicon features no stuffed fish, challah, beygeleh etc. No question of putting matzos on the menu of usual restaurants on Passover. There are not even Jewish cookbooks (certainly not in general retail). Moreover, the category of kashrut is nonexistent on the level of mass production. There is not a single Russian product with the sticker “K”. (For comparison – in New York even some hot-dog stands display a note that reads “kosher”.) Russia in general lacks what is called a public display of Jewishness. True, most of her Jews are secular, distant from the traditions. But firstly, this is the reason, while I am merely describing a phenomenon without going deep into causal effects. And secondly, the point is not the distance, but rather the presence of a certain mobile group (a critical mass if you will), concerned with creating and supporting an image and promoting its interests on every level – restaurant to parliament. On the other hand, a ramified Jewish infrastructure has appeared in the FSU in the latter 15 years: synagogues, cheseds, community centers, educational facilities are being built and renovated. I wonder – who owns these material values? Not legally; culturally. In other words – who needs all these? The answer is quite obvious: most Russian Jews are not “investors” nor “shareholders” in the Jewish structures, have no interest in the inheritance, and often know nothing about it.

Social culture
Here, too, it is appropriate to discuss organizations. Today it is no overstatement that the modern Jewish community in Russia is not a group, united through a common history, goals, and interests, but quite simply a corporate body, i.e., an official organization (or a set of them), created and existing to provide various services, first and foremost to the Jewish population. Any attempt to coordinate the work of Jewish organizations ends either in nothing or in another organization. To be fair, some organizations have a more-or-less constant circle of clients, who however have no effect on either the activity or even the existence of the organization. The wars over closing and opening Jewish organizations are usually fought on the administrative/bureaucratic level and have nothing to do with the target group. The budget battles may be called “fund-wrestling”.
Hence the definition of a leader; it is usually the official head of some organization or other. Even a rabbi for the sake of his own legitimization must hold the position of a Rabbi-in-Chief. These offices (including the rabbi) are non-elective, and the main aim of every leader if to preserve his/her own organization. The notion of a council of trustees is purely nominal.
Nor does Russia have a financial-political lobby. The only lobby worth talking about is the intra-Jewish one, representing in some way the interests of the Russian Jews (i.e., the structures and the organizations) before the foreign sponsors. Most of the organizations are subsidized by external, foreign sponsors. So there are barely any financial leaders too. Potential insider sponsors are interested in oil, football, and politics more than in the fate of the Jewish community. Things are not much better with the so-called “spiritual” leaders either. As mentioned before, the rabbis are in fact also heads of synagogues or various federations and confederacies. They have business and administration to attend to; they have very little times for social and educational work as such, like, say, writing books. In any case, not one of the rabbis currently residing in Russia is as much as an intellectual authority, not to mention a dominant intellectual influence. Some of the “infiltrates” from various instances happen to be interesting, but these are temporary people whose memory hardly outlives their term of office. Unless some culture-flusher, having done his/her time in Moscow, removes his/her shoulder straps, cleans the Jewish stables with his/her witty pen, and immortalizes his/her image in book sales. There has been no “Jewish intelligentsia” in the sense of a group of people with a social-cultural reputation and position, educated in the Jewish way (versed in Hebrew, reading the Talmud or Tanakh etc.), publicly identifying themselves as Jews, and most importantly, active in the Jewish context (journalism, philanthropy, literature, theatre, cultural ties, human rights activities etc.) – no such group in Russia, perhaps since the last members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were shot. The Jewish organizations are trying to impose Mikhail Zhvanetsky, Arkady Arkanov, Mark Rozovsky, Gennady Khazanov and other stand-up comedians as cultural idols. Well, to each his own living – some moonlight as Santa Claus at matinees, and others subsist as “the Sages of Zion” with not much to do and no dependence on the season; a standard performance for a standard fee.
Perhaps due to lack of leadership and a general inertness of the masses is another regrettable fact. In the last ten years at least there was no private initiative, originating from “down below”, in the Jewish context: no mutual aid groups, no cultural unions, no educational circles, no human-rights or political action. There is no “private” school out there without the jurisdiction of the Israeli Ministry of Education.

Spiritual culture
Here is a selection of the main programs of a Jewish cultural center in Moscow: yoga, children’s ballet school, popular singing school for children, ballroom dance school, music school, children’s theatre school, children’s art school, pottery class, textile doll-making course. There is an Anglican center close by with the same set of services available, but all the classes there are in English. Goethe Institute publishes its booklets and posters in German too; here everything is in Russian. How else, surely not Hebrew?? You can indeed take a Hebrew class, but speaking it is not on the employees’ list of duties, and to “Khag sameakh!” the manager girl’s reply was “Anna!”
Granted, there is both a beit-midrash and a school of madrichim since recently. It would be unfair to complain, all in all: even Klezmer and Ladino concerts are held in Moscow today. No matter that there are less such bands in all of Moscow than fingers on one hand. So they are few – but they exist. The Eshkol project has introduced Jewish Israeli culture to various clubs. Who cares that most of these are second-rate rock-bands which sometimes sing in English? Books are also coming out now. Though few, mostly for children, and translated to boot. On the upside, the intellectuals on the Booknik website have something to write about; and then the website is complemented with reviews on books containing the word “Jew” at least once, jokes, stories, and recipes. Such websites are many. Those who so desire in Moscow today have the option of learning Cabbala, attending lectures in scholarly and non-scholarly Judaism, learning Hebrew, sending their children to Jewish kindergartens and schools, attending Jewish theaters and youth clubs. There are even Jewish discos.
Dismissing the skepticism and the sarcasm, the following problems can be pointed out.

1. Quantity. Even in its entirety the Jewish cultural and intellectual life is nano-sized on Moscow’s scale and is invisible to the naked eye on the cultural map of the city. Even once the eye is properly dressed it is difficult to spot even two or three events a week.
2. Quality. The low quality of Jewish cultural events has been discussed copiously. Usually on offer is either a provincial amateur product or a substitute in the shape of scholarly conferences, venerable maestros and rock-n-roll of the 1960s, and costly festive banquets.
3. Finally, the essential point. Any culture, Jewish culture even more so, belongs to the world of texts and is impossible without it. The main function of culture in its spiritual sense is creating and transmitting meanings – a vital function in the Jewish context. If Torah (Lore, Text) is comparable to the air the Jewish people have been breathing for millennia, then midrash is the blood, delivering oxygen to the cells. It is common knowledge that when blood circulation stops, the body dies. It seems that in this sense the Jewish culture in Russia is long dead. It died in the traditional sense and did not come back in a modern style, following, say, Levinas. There are no teachers, nor interested students. Direct contact with the Book is lost, and the text only appears rendered. Many Jewish organizations even lack its physical incarnation: thus, in Hillel I was hard pressed to find enough copies of the Tanakh. Several Humashes were found after weeks of searching. The Steinsaltz Institute for Jewish Studies’ attempt to organize beit-midrashes throughout the country has practically failed. The beit-midrashic “school” of the late Yulya Shurukht is still developing – a somewhat poetic movement, in my view, certainly important, but too focused on itself with no connection to actual life.

In other words, Jewish spiritual life in Russia is mostly a culture of consuming “tinned food” (no protein, no vitamins) and is more related to the material realm than the spiritual.

Worldview
To summarize all that has been said: lack of an intellectual elite, of a tradition of learning and interpreting texts, and of a common cultural canon, relevant to the given place and time, leads to atrophy of the cultural languages and therefore to loss of values and blurring of moral and ethical boundaries. Consequently production and consumption fade out in the material realm, and social bonds are destroyed or not even created. The culture dies. That is, morality still exists, and values probably do as well, but all in the framework of a foreign language – meaning that the identity is foreign, and so is the culture.
Thank God there is at least that.