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Solzhenitsyn Book Infuriates Russian Jews

Posted on by Ivan the Terrible

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's charge in his latest book that Jews were as much perpetrators of Soviet communist repression as they were its victims has infuriated Russian Jews, who say that the book is filled with inaccuracies.

One prominent Jewish leader told Britain's Guardian newspaper that the book was without merit.

"This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes," Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress told the Guardian. "Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews.

"This is not a book about how the Jews and Russians lived together for 200 years, but one about how they lived apart after finding themselves on the same territory. This book is a weak one professionally. Factually, it is so bad as to be beyond criticism. As literature, it is not of any merit."

In the book, "Two Hundred Years Together," Solzhenitsyn, 84, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for being the first to expose the horrors of the Stalinist gulag [the chain of brutal Soviet prison camps where he was imprisoned], deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims.

One charge that has Russian Jews angry was his claim that "If I would care to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps was especially hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust national generalisation. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw - their life was softer than that of others."

He then adds: "But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police - forerunners of the KGB] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect."

According to the Guardian, the book's title refers to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population. Three chapters discuss the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

Solzhenitsyn argues that Russia must come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary genocides - and that its Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them.

"My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and the psychology of the Jews - their spiritual component," he said. "I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited. Zhabotinsky [a Jewish writer] once said that the best service our Russian friends give to us is never to speak aloud about us."

DM Thomas, one of Solzhenitsyn's biographers, told the Guardian that he did not think the book was fuelled by anti-Semitism. "I would not doubt his sincerity. He says that he firmly supports the state of Israel. In his fiction and factual writing there are Jewish characters that he writes about who are bright, decent, anti-Stalinist people."

Professor Robert Service of Oxford University, an expert on 20th century Russian history, praised the book saying what he has read about it shows that Solzhenitsyn was "absolutely right".

While researching a book on Lenin, Prof Service told the Guardian that he came across details of how Trotsky, who was of Jewish origin, asked the politburo in 1919 to ensure that Jews were enrolled in the Red army. Trotsky said that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka.

"Trotsky's idea was that the spread of anti-Semitism was [partly due to] objections about their entrance into the civil service. There is something in this; that they were not just passive spectators of the revolution. They were part-victims and part-perpetrators."

Less complimentary was Vassili Berezhkov, a retired KGB colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB) who told the Guardian that he failed to see the need for Solzhenitsyn's reopening past wounds at this time.

"The question of ethnicity did not have any importance either in the revolution or the story of the NKVD. This was a social revolution and those who served in the NKVD and cheka were serving ideas of social change," he explained.

"If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-Semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now."



TOPICS:

Foreign Affairs

Front Page News

Russia

KEYWORDS:

czarist

royalist

russia

solzhenitsyn





To: Ivan the Terrible

"But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw - their life was softer than that of others." All except for my Russian Jewish friends who were tortured or died in the camps.



To: Ivan the Terrible

"If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-Semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now." I guess PC is not just a US phenomenon.



To: Ivan the Terrible; Yehuda; SJackson; yonif

But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw - their life was softer than that of others." I read THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, and also THE FIRST CIRCLE, Solzhenitsyn's novel based on his own experience. He bragged that he was able to get his poor little dissident self assigned to an "island of paradise", a "Club Red" for scientists and academics. In the camps where he was kept, EVERYONE had it easy. Here is a memoir of a Rabbi who survived the Gulag, and he did not have as comfy a vacation as Solzhenitsyn.



To: Ivan the Terrible

Solzhenitsyn's writings always need to be taken in their full context. His enemies have used selective quotation to accuse him of anti-Semitism before, without justification. The fact that many of Lenin's collaborators in the Bolshevik Party, and in the Russian and European revolutionary movement generally, were of Jewish origin is indisputable. It's worth noting as a historical anomaly with readily identifiable causes. It is not anti-Semitic to point this out, unless one veers into Nazi ravings about "Judeo-Bolshevism". I doubt very much that this is Solzhenitsyn's thesis. Now Stalin - there was a real anti-Semite.



To: Nachum

Solzhenitsyn is totally correct. One of the first laws promulgated by the communists was a law making anti-semitism a crime.



To: PaulJ

I guess PC is not just a US phenomenon. But it seems to be more virulent here. I checked a couple of weeks ago, and French and German translations of the first volume of this two-volume work are available from amazon.fr and amazon.de. The French translation appeared in March 2002. Yet no English translation seems to be available, not here in the U.S., not in the UK, nowhere. Got to wonder why is that.



To: cynicom

Totally correct in saying that Jews in the camps had it easier? That is utter nonsense.



To: Nachum

Well, I guess the Jews that survived camps did have it easier than those Jews who perished in the pogroms.



To: Ivan the Terrible

"If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-Semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now." Solzhenitsyn is fanatically committed to the truth, no matter if it is pleasant or not , or what are the consequences. I think that he believes that truth is the path to God. He must be a very difficult person in his private life.



To: Nachum

He did time, I will have to accept his word.



To: A. Pole

"If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-Semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now." Hmm, almost every person in Eastern Europe knows about NKVD and early Bolshevik regime. I do not think that this can be the key point of his book. Solzhenitsyn is fanatically committed to the truth, no matter if it is pleasant or not , or what are the consequences. I think that he believes that truth is the path to God. He must be a very difficult person in his private life. I do not understand how he was able to find a woman willing to marry him?



To: Ivan the Terrible

The participation of Jews in the prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Bolshevism is well documented by Robert Conquest as well as others. Many Jews felt, as they do now, that they were the underdogs and tended to gravitate to underdog political movements. There is nothing new to this information.



To: Ivan the Terrible

"Yevgeny Satanovsky"



Not a very felicitous last name, IMHO.



To: TexanToTheCore

Agree. There is nothing new here that should be considered controversial.



Comment #16 Removed by Moderator

To: A. Pole

I recall that Solzhenitsyn divorced and re-married.



To: A. Pole

Solzhenitsyn is fanatically committed to the truth, no matter if it is pleasant or not , or what are the consequences. I think that he believes that truth is the path to God. He must be a very difficult person in his private life. I'm sure you are right on both scores, must be why I love him so much.



To: cynicom

And what about my friends who "did time"? Is their testimony untrue because Solzhenitsyn wrote a book? How many Jews would have had to go to Siberia, or Lefertovo prison to satisfy one who takes this man's word? I have plenty of people I can bring forward who suffered horribly in the camps. Just as much as anyone else. This is my experience. Jews suffered just like everyone else under the communists. What about the Jews that died in Pogroms, did he mention them in his book? Did he mention the mobs that slaughtered men, women, and children? Did he mention Baba Yar? Did he mention a special Soviet "Jewish" secret police, dedicated only to sending their fellow Jews to prison or worse? Jews were systematically sent to Siberia for nothing more than practicing Judaism. They were tortured for teaching Judaism. They were executed for saying anything in public about it. Did this author mention those people? Solzhenitxyn knew nothing of this, and now he is an expert? I take his word for nothing about the plight of Soviet Jews. Not because he is hateful, only because he is ignorant.



To: Ivan the Terrible

To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police - forerunners of the KGB] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect. Right. It would be like blaming the Germans for the Holocaust just because the Camp guards tended to be Germans. (ROFLMAO) I believe that the Soviet Jews could be classified into 3 main groups: the Mensheviks who were the leftists non on Lenin's side (the Bolsheviks). Then, the Bolshevik Jews themselves were split between the followers of Trotsky who advocated spreading the revlutionary terror world-wide and the followers of Stalin who were happy with the 'go slow' method of fully terrorizing the Russian first. The Stalinists, as they happened to be in control until the 50's, tended not to be very kind with the Jews who seemed to be follwing Trotsky.



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