Solzhenitsyn Book Infuriates Russian Jews

News Max ^ | Jan. 25, 2003

[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."

[Little Bill]

Solzhenitsyn has always said things that people do not want to hear. From my own readings he is correct to a point, to judge from the artical, but after 1938 the Jews joined the rest of the oppressed.

I suspect that most of the self hating Jews and their families come to the States before 1953.

[unspun]

"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."

Seems to me that he does say here, that life for Jews overall in the gulags was especially hard. (Or have my brain receptors failed me?) If he saw that things were different in those particular camps in which he was incarcerated, he did. Obviously by his earlier statement, he has no bone to pick, with Jews. Furthermore, by this statement and others he shows that generalizing is not his purpose.

Jesus was a Jew; so was Caiaphas. So were John the Baptist and Herod both, ethnically. David and Absalom? - Both of the tribe of Benjamin. Elijah was a descendent of Israel, so was Ahab. So what? So we're all human.

(Well, Jesus was also something more than that, but that's another matter. ;-` I'm just very glad myself, to be of "an engrafted branch.")

[SJackson]

Thanks for the ping. I've read reviews, but obviously haven't read the book (my French stinks, no German, no Russian).

You wonder why? Guys, do you really think the English speaking world is more PC, in the context of banning books, than the French and German speaking world? So far as I know the reason Amazon doesn't carry it is it's not yet published in English. I've no way of knowing if the books antisemitic or not, if it is I know the languages I'd publish it in after Arabic though, and English would be third on my list.

I don't know when the versions you read came out, but good grief, it's only been around a year and a half or so in Russian. I'm sure Amazon will get to it.

[unspun]

If anyone were to accuse A.S. of overgeneralizing, he might as well accuse Chuck Close of broad-brushing.

[Nachum]

I have no problem with your explanation, he takes a cheap shot, that's all.

[PhilipFreneau]

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.

I agree. The evil parties in old Russia were leftists, some who were formerly Jews. We have the same problem in modern America, where the evil parties are leftists (aka liberals), some who were formerly Jews.

[unspun]

I think he sketches life in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia with a .3mm pencil.

At first blush, it looks to me like he may be making a distinction between how those Jews in this particular Lenin/Trotsky 'cult' were considered who were viewed as intellectuals, compared to how the hoi polloi Jews were considered.

An interesting thing to consider (by those with a pure heart for it) given stereotypes that exist elsewhere.

[SJackson]

At first blush, it looks to me like he may be making a distinction between how those Jews in this particular Lenin/Trotsky 'cult' were considered who were viewed as intellectuals, compared to how the hoi polloi Jews were considered.

I've not seen the book, but from those who write of it favorably, I understand the distinction he draws is between Jews, and secular non-Jews.

[eclectic]

He says that he firmly supports the state of Israel

One cannot be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semite, but anti-Zionism certainly cannot be equalled with anti-Semitism! Solzh belongs to that rare species of anti-Semites, who are also Zionists. He just wants all Jews to leave Mother Russia for Israel. His book is absolutely disgusting. I lost all respect for the bum

[cynicom]

Reference? Just know it from history.

[Cicero]

In the early days, "progressive" Jews did play a leading part in the Soviet terror. Trotsky was a Jew. Litvinov was Jewish. So were many other key players, including members of the secret police. And it goes back all the way to the first Russian Revolutionaries who assassinated Tsar Nicholas II in the 19th century--also Jewish.

In Hungary, the murderous revolutionary Bela Kun and his followers were Jewish. The situation was not unlike what we see in America today, although much bloodier for both perpetrators and victims, with some Jews remaining loyal to Judaism and persecuted for it, and others seduced by the bloodthirsty, visionary left.

Ironically, these "progressive" Jews stirred up hatred of Jews among the Cossacks and others who suffered from revolutionary violence, and it was the religious Jews who got it in the neck, although they were entirely innocent, because they were much more visibly identifiable as Jews because of their dress.

The Communist party in the Soviet Union had a complicated relationship with Jews. In Stalin's late years certainly the Jews suffered as much as anyone else.

I am very much against antisemitism, but I also believe that we need to look at history squarely. And, needless to say, the fact that not all Jews were on the side of the victims should be an excuse for antisemitism.

[Justa]

"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."

Oh yeah, the old Gulag scam.

/sarcasm.

[bribriagain]

"All except for my Russian Jewish friends who were tortured or died in the camps."

My deepest sympathies.

[bribriagain]

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

Move along, nothing to see here folks.

[sheik yerbouty]

Solz is a liar and a paskudniak! He went to the cushy camp.

[bribriagain]

"We can call of this Jew-bashing irrational or hateful, but it's part of history. Modern, European anti-Semitism is based on real events, even if the interpretation of those events is skewed."

Please be advised that any attempts on your part to convey the truth will be met by scorn and ridicule. While this is not official FR policy, it is our policy, none-the -less.

Word

[xJones]

"Directly after the First World War, there were another three specifically Jewish Communist revolutions in Europe itself:

• the Jewish German, Kurt Eisner, led a short lived communist revolution in Munich, Bavaria from November 1918 to February 1919 (at the same time that Adolf Hitler was an unknown soldier in that city);

• the short lived Sparticus uprising in Berlin (September 1918 to January 1919) led by the Jewish German, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg; and

• the short lived Communist tyranny in Hungary led by the Jewish Bela Kun, from March to August 1919."

There was a very disproportinate percentage of Jewish Bolshevik leaders during and after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and continued until Stalin's purges in the 1930s. The Cheka (later GPU, OGPU, NKVD, and finally KGB) had large numbers of Jewish officers until the 1930s and an estimated (by Ukranians) 80% of the forces overseeing the forced famine in Ukraine during the early 1930s were Jewish. These are facts well remembered by the Russian and Ukrainian people, who show a distinct tendancy to blame all Jews for the actions of a Jewish minority while forgetting their own history of pogroms.

" As it happens, for complex reasons, Jewish vulnerability - to geopolitical turmoil, to the whims of the ruling authorities, to the hostility of their neighbours - was nowhere greater in post- seventeenth century European history than in Ukraine. In 1648-49 the Jews suffered their worst calamity since the Crusades when the bands of Bohdan Khmelnytsky pitilessly slaughtered tens of thousands. In 1768 terrible massacres by bands of Ukrainian peasants, haidamaks, took place. Even in the relatively civilised conditions of pre-First World War Europe, liberal opinion was shocked by the frightful pogroms of Russian Ukraine, especially in 1881 after the assassination of Alexander II and in the period immediately before and during the revolution of 1905. The most terrible massacres of Jews between Khmelnytsky and Hitler occurred in Ukraine between 1918 and 1920. Historians estimate that during their course - which reached their peak in 1919, where some 685 separate outbreaks of major violence took place - between 50,000 and 100,000 were killed and that even larger numbers were mutilated or orphaned."

It's true that many Jews understandably saw themselves as perpetual underdogs after generations of pogroms, and gladly joined the new political movement falsely promising equality and leveling of old social and economic systems. But that didn't take place in a vacuum and the large majority of Jews had nothing to do with it. But the selective memories of the relative Jewish Bolshevik percentages have lingered for decades.

Europe, home of it's own pogroms, saw those 3 tumultuous short-lived communist revolutions and remembered only that they were all led by Jews. The uninvolved large majority of Jews became tarred with the same brush. It's history, it's over, and while it does NO good to dwell on it, to try pretend things never happened would be as bad as denying any other historical fact for PC's sake. But it's a part of a very long, very torturously woven tapestry.

[Alouette]

Oh yeah, the old Gulag scam.

OK, fine, don't take my word for it. Go to the library and check out copies of THE FIRST CIRCLE and THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO and read the parts in which he describes the resort-camp he got himself into by claiming his profession was "nuclear physicist."

I'll wait here. ...tapping foot...

[bribriagain]

"They were tortured for teaching Judaism. "

May God punish those who did this. I just hope they were not secular jews.