Will a Jew Be Russia's Next President?

Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov is known for taking risks. A shrewd entrepreneur, he made billions in the precious metals industry before his 40th birthday and became the first non-North American owner of an NBA team last year when he bought the floundering New Jersey Nets.

Now, the 46-year-old bachelor wants a shot at Russia's highest office and, thanks to a wave of middle class dissatisfaction stemming from allegedly rigged parliamentary elections, he may have a chance.

"I think the society is waking up, whether we want it to or not," he said Monday while announcing his intent to challenge Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as an independent in the country's 2012 presidential election.

"That part of the government which does not establish dialogue with society, it will have to go in the near future. Serious changes are taking place in the world, and a new kind of man is emerging."

While it's still too early to tell if Prokhorov poses a serious threat to Putin, who has already served two presidential terms, his Jewish ancestry is already raising eyebrows.

According a profile in the New York Times, his maternal grandmother, Anna Belkina, was a prominent Jewish microbiologist who made vaccines during World War II. It was through the precarious nature of her work that a family dynamic emerged in which the budding Prokhorov developed a strong sense of his own destiny.

Belkina was Jewish but avoided the fate of many of her colleagues who were fined, exiled or killed during the tide of antisemitism that swept through Soviet society after [the war]. Though she wrote two doctoral theses, she was denied a chance to defend them and never got a Ph.D. She went to sleep every night with a bag packed, expecting to be arrested before morning.

"We lived with great contradictions," Prokhorov said. "There was the public need to support the regime, and then there was the private life in the kitchen, where we listened to Voice of America on the radio, and read forbidden books and had discussions in a very soft manner about all sorts of things. I learned from both my parents that you had to be clever. They could think in a different way, but they made their views very soft. When you are 12 or 14, it’s not easy to feel the limits of what you are allowed to say or do."

By most outward accounts, Prokhorov does not embrace his Jewish roots although he likewise doesn't flaunt any demeanor that would upend his fearless, unattached persona.

Critics aren't yet sure what to make of his candidacy, which Prokhorov called "the most important decision of my life."

"I hope it is his own wish, not a proposition to play the role of a spoiler," said Andrei Dunayev, a leader of Right Cause, a right-of-center political party that Prokhorov quit in September.

"If he wants it himself, then I will support him wholeheartedly. If he is taking the role of a spoiler because someone has proposed it to him, then it is disgusting."

Stay tuned.

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