add protection templat |
fixing Dianne's errors and condemning her censorship campaign |
||
Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{pp-semi|small=yes}} |
|||
{{Infobox book| |
{{Infobox book| |
||
| name = Two Hundred Years Together |
| name = Two Hundred Years Together |
||
Line 13: | Line 12: | ||
| genre = |
| genre = |
||
| publisher = |
| publisher = |
||
| release_date = 2002 |
| release_date = [[2002]] |
||
| media_type = |
| media_type = |
||
| pages = |
| pages = |
||
Line 23: | Line 22: | ||
}}'''"Two hundred years together"''' is a 2-volume historical essay by [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]. |
}}'''"Two hundred years together"''' is a 2-volume historical essay by [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]. |
||
Solzhenitsyn published this two-volume work on the history of [[Russians|Russian]]-[[Jewish]] relations in 2001 and 2002. The book stirred controversy and is viewed by |
Solzhenitsyn published this two-volume work on the history of [[Russians|Russian]]-[[Jewish]] relations in 2001 and 2002. The book stirred controversy and is viewed by some historians as unreliable and [[antisemitism|antisemitic]] <ref>Dimensional Spaces in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together. By Zinaida Gimpelevich.</ref><ref>http://berkovich-zametki.com/2006/Zametki/Nomer6/VOstrovsky1.htm</ref><ref>http://www.sunround.com/club/22/133_chanan.htm</ref>. The book was published in [[French language|French]] and [[German language|German]] in 2002-2003, but there is no English translation to date (2010). |
||
== Summary == |
== Summary == |
||
In |
In the book, Solzhenitsyn documents the extremely high representation of Jews in the Bolshevik regime. However, he takes issue with the positions of individuals who attribute this to a Jewish conspiracy, denouncing "the superstitious faith in the historical potency of conspiracies", and the fact that proponents of this idea are prone to ignore the "Russian failings that determined our sad historical decline."<ref>''The Solzhenitsyn Reader'', p. 496</ref> |
||
Solzhenitsyn criticizes the "scandalous" weakness and "unpardonable inaction" that prevented the Russian imperial state from adequately protecting the lives and property of its Jewish subjects. But he claims that the pogroms were in '''almost''' every case organized from "below" and not by the Russian state authorities. He criticizes the "vexing," "scandalous", and "distressing" restrictions on the civil liberties of Jewish subjects during the final decades of the Russian old regime. On that score, in chapter ten of the work he expresses his admiration for the efforts of Pyotr Stolypin (Prime Minister of Russia from 1906 until 1911) to eliminate all legal [[Disabilities (Jewish)|disabilities]] against Jews in Russia.{{Or|date=July 2009}} |
Solzhenitsyn criticizes the "scandalous" weakness and "unpardonable inaction" that prevented the Russian imperial state from adequately protecting the lives and property of its Jewish subjects. But he claims that the pogroms were in '''almost''' every case organized from "below" and not by the Russian state authorities. He criticizes the "vexing," "scandalous", and "distressing" restrictions on the civil liberties of Jewish subjects during the final decades of the Russian old regime. On that score, in chapter ten of the work he expresses his admiration for the efforts of Pyotr Stolypin (Prime Minister of Russia from 1906 until 1911) to eliminate all legal [[Disabilities (Jewish)|disabilities]] against Jews in Russia.{{Or|date=July 2009}} |
||
Line 41: | Line 40: | ||
Critics focus on Solzhenitsyn's insistence that Jews were as much perpetrators as victims in the communist repression, and that both Russians and Jews need to acknowledge their share of sin.<ref name=young>Cathy Young: [http://www.reason.com/news/show/29113.html Traditional Prejudices. The [[anti-Semitism]] of Alexander Solzhenitsyn] ''[[Reason Magazine]]'' May, 2004.</ref> Questions related to Jewish participation in the three Revolutions have been controversial. As Vassili Berezhkov, a retired [[KGB]] colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the [[KGB]]), said: "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. 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."<ref name=guardian>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/25/russia.books Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution] ''[[The Guardian]]'' January 25, 2003.</ref> Others feel that Jews were not implicated enough to warrant a comparison with Russian antisemitism, or that any notion of the [[Collective responsibility]] should not be brought up.<ref name=young /> |
Critics focus on Solzhenitsyn's insistence that Jews were as much perpetrators as victims in the communist repression, and that both Russians and Jews need to acknowledge their share of sin.<ref name=young>Cathy Young: [http://www.reason.com/news/show/29113.html Traditional Prejudices. The [[anti-Semitism]] of Alexander Solzhenitsyn] ''[[Reason Magazine]]'' May, 2004.</ref> Questions related to Jewish participation in the three Revolutions have been controversial. As Vassili Berezhkov, a retired [[KGB]] colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the [[KGB]]), said: "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. 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."<ref name=guardian>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/25/russia.books Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution] ''[[The Guardian]]'' January 25, 2003.</ref> Others feel that Jews were not implicated enough to warrant a comparison with Russian antisemitism, or that any notion of the [[Collective responsibility]] should not be brought up.<ref name=young /> |
||
Solzhenitsyn |
Solzhenitsyn documents the over-representation of Jews in the early [[Bolshevik]] leadership and the security apparatus, noting, for instance, that of the 22 ministers in the first Soviet government three were Russian, one [[Georgian people|Georgian]], one [[Armenians|Armenian]] and 17 Jews. This has been an issue of contention, but the fact is that many of the "Russian" leaders of the Bolsheviks were simply Jews who changed their names, as confirmed by Jewish Sources. The Encyclopedia Judaica notes in it's entry under Communism that "The Communist movement and ideology played an important part in Jewish life, particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, and during and after World War II." It then presents a list of the Judeo-Bolshevik elite, including Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), Jacob Sverdlov, Lev Kamenev (Rozenfeld), Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lazar Kaganovich (who was very powerful in the Stalin regime), and many others. Lenin, whose maternal grandfather, Israel Blank, was Jewish, said that Jews made the best revolutionaries: "The clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him." (Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, p. 112). |
||
Bertrand Russell, initially a supporter of the Revolution, acknowledged this, saying that "Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action." (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (George Allen & Unwin, London 1975), pp. 354-5) |
|||
⚫ | Solzhenitsyn also accused Jews of wartime cowardice, and evasion of active duty, stating "I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew." while ignoring both the Jewish frontline casualties and the high number of Jews decorated for bravery in battle<ref>http://www.jewniverse.ru/biher/AShulman/30.htm</ref>. He |
||
Winston Churchill would assert that "There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. |
|||
Similarities between ''Two Hundred years together'' and an antisemitic essay titled “Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia”, attributed to Solzhenitsyn, has led to inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself claims that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him, and then manipulated, forty years ago.<ref name=young /><ref>Cathy Young: [http://www.reason.com/news/show/29241.html Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney] in ''Reason Magazine'', August–September 2004.</ref> However, according to the historian [[Semyon Reznik]], textological analyses have in fact proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship<ref>http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2003/0611/win/reznik.htm</ref>. |
|||
In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed, the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. |
|||
The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. |
|||
...The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with villainies which are now being perpetrated...Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people." (Illustrated Sunday Herald, Feb. 8, 1920) |
|||
An article in the New York Times, Nov. 3, 1999, noted that "...a letter sent to the Vatican by Pius XII in 1919, when he was Bishop Eugenio Pacelli and papal nuncio in Munich...reports on his deputy's unpleasant encounter with Bolshevik revolutionaries who were then terrorizing Catholic priests and the German bourgeoisie. The letter describes the leader, Max Lieven as a '... Russian and a Jew.' The letter also describes Mr. Lieven's companions, '...Jews like the rest of them.'...Bishop Pacelli's description of Jewish Communists...was hardly uncommon 80 years ago." |
|||
In the Bolshevik era, 52 percent of the membership of the Soviet communist party was Jewish, though Jews comprised only 1.8 percent of the total population (Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin, p. 81) At least one hundred Soviet generals were Jewish (Canadian Jewish News, April 19, 1989). |
|||
The first law passed after the Communists seized power in Russia made anti-semitism a crime punishable by death. in a 1937 interview in the New York Jewish newspaper, Daily Forward, Trotsky said, "The longer the rotten bourgeoisie society lives, the more and more barbaric will anti-Semitism become everywhere."(Izvestia, July 27, 1918). Chaim Bermant, writing in the Jewish Chronicle (Aug. 30, 1991), says: "It was Communism which toppled the hated Czars, Communism which removed Jewish disabilities and proscribed anti-Semitism and Communism which, in its early days at least, opened the doors to Jewish advancement." |
|||
According to Jewish researcher John Sack, "In 1945 many Poles felt (and not without reason) that Jews ran the Office of State Security...the chief of the Office was Jacob Berman, a Jew, and all or almost all the department heads were Jews." Sack reports that 75% of the officers of the Communist Secret Police in Silesia were Jews. He noted that many Jews in the Communist terror apparatus in Poland changed their names to Polish ones like General Romkowski, Colonel Rozanski, Capt. Studencki and Lt. Jurkowski. (cf. John Sack, The New Republic, Feb. 14, 1994, p. 6). |
|||
The writers of the Jewish Chronicle asserted on April 4th, 1919 that "The ideals of Bolshevism at many points are consonant with the finest ideals of Judaism." The French Jewish newspaper Le Droit de Vivre wrote on May 13, 1933 that "Judaism is the father of Marxism and Communism." Neither Communism nor Zionism would exist in it's modern form were it not for Moses Hess, mentor of Karl Marx.<ref>Avineri, Shlomo. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism. New York Univ Pr, 1987.</ref> |
|||
⚫ | Solzhenitsyn also accused Jews of wartime cowardice, and evasion of active duty, stating "I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew." while ignoring both the Jewish frontline casualties and the high number of Jews decorated for bravery in battle<ref>http://www.jewniverse.ru/biher/AShulman/30.htm</ref>. He furthermore noted that Jews had a much easier life in the GULAG camps <ref>"200 years together":"... в лагерь присылаешься и узнаёшь: если у тебя удачная нация - ты счастливчик, ты обеспечен, ты выжил... В лагерях, где я сидел... евреям, насколько обобщать можно, жилось легче, чем остальным."</ref>. |
||
==Richard Pipes review== |
==Richard Pipes review== |
||
Line 79: | Line 96: | ||
[[Category:2001 books]] |
[[Category:2001 books]] |
||
[[Category:Antisemitism]] |
|||
[[Category:Works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]] |
[[Category:Works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]] |
||
[[Category:Jewish history books]] |
[[Category:Jewish history books]] |
Revision as of 23:15, 20 November 2010
Author | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
---|---|
Translator | not translated (English) |
Language | Russian |
Publication date | 2002 |
Publication place | Russia |
ISBN | ISBN 978-5969703728 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
"Two hundred years together" is a 2-volume historical essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn published this two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations in 2001 and 2002. The book stirred controversy and is viewed by some historians as unreliable and antisemitic [1][2][3]. The book was published in French and German in 2002-2003, but there is no English translation to date (2010).
Summary
In the book, Solzhenitsyn documents the extremely high representation of Jews in the Bolshevik regime. However, he takes issue with the positions of individuals who attribute this to a Jewish conspiracy, denouncing "the superstitious faith in the historical potency of conspiracies", and the fact that proponents of this idea are prone to ignore the "Russian failings that determined our sad historical decline."[4]
Solzhenitsyn criticizes the "scandalous" weakness and "unpardonable inaction" that prevented the Russian imperial state from adequately protecting the lives and property of its Jewish subjects. But he claims that the pogroms were in almost every case organized from "below" and not by the Russian state authorities. He criticizes the "vexing," "scandalous", and "distressing" restrictions on the civil liberties of Jewish subjects during the final decades of the Russian old regime. On that score, in chapter ten of the work he expresses his admiration for the efforts of Pyotr Stolypin (Prime Minister of Russia from 1906 until 1911) to eliminate all legal disabilities against Jews in Russia.[original research?]
In the spirit of his classic 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations"[5], Solzhenitsyn calls for the Russians and Russian Jews alike to take responsibility for the "renegades" in both communities who supported a totalitarian and terrorist regime after 1917. At the end of chapter 15, he writes that Jews must answer for the "revolutionary cutthroats" in their ranks just as Russians must repent "for the pogroms, for...merciless arsonist peasants, for...crazed revolutionary soldiers." It is not, he adds, a matter of answering "before other peoples, but to oneself, to one's consciousness, and before God."[6]
Solzhenitsyn also takes the anti-Communist White movement to task for condoning violence against Jews and thus undermining "what would have been the chief benefit of a White victory" in the Russian Civil War: "a reasonable evolution of the Russian state."
While some have criticized Solzhenitsyn for highlighting Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik regime, especially in its early period, few commentators have noticed his praise of Russian Jews for their disproportionate involvement in the "dissident" movement of the 1960s and 70s. As Solzhenitsyn notes, the activity of Jewish dissidents played a major and salutary role in undermining the legitimacy of Soviet communism.
Reception
The reception of Two Hundred Years Together has been quite varied. A distinguished historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern of Northwestern University have published a refutation of Solzhenitsyn's claims and has bluntly accused him of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, distinguished historians such as Geoffrey Hosking[7] and Robert Service have defended Solzhenitsyn against his detractors. Service has argued (before he actually read the book in question) that Solzhenitsyn is "absolutely right" that Jews were disproportionately represented in the early Soviet bureaucracy. Service also notes that Solzhenitsyn is very far from the anti-Semitism of the extreme Russian Right and addresses this issue in a moderate and responsible manner. In a review of volume 1 of Two Hundred Years Together that appeared in The New Republic[8] Harvard historian Richard Pipes, a longtime critic of Solzhenitsyn, argues that the book exonerates Solzhenitsyn from any suspicion of anti-Semitism. Two Hundred Years Together has yet to appear in English although significant excerpts from the work can be found in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings: 1947-2005.
Critics focus on Solzhenitsyn's insistence that Jews were as much perpetrators as victims in the communist repression, and that both Russians and Jews need to acknowledge their share of sin.[9] Questions related to Jewish participation in the three Revolutions have been controversial. As Vassili Berezhkov, a retired KGB colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), said: "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. 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."[10] Others feel that Jews were not implicated enough to warrant a comparison with Russian antisemitism, or that any notion of the Collective responsibility should not be brought up.[9]
Solzhenitsyn documents the over-representation of Jews in the early Bolshevik leadership and the security apparatus, noting, for instance, that of the 22 ministers in the first Soviet government three were Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews. This has been an issue of contention, but the fact is that many of the "Russian" leaders of the Bolsheviks were simply Jews who changed their names, as confirmed by Jewish Sources. The Encyclopedia Judaica notes in it's entry under Communism that "The Communist movement and ideology played an important part in Jewish life, particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, and during and after World War II." It then presents a list of the Judeo-Bolshevik elite, including Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), Jacob Sverdlov, Lev Kamenev (Rozenfeld), Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lazar Kaganovich (who was very powerful in the Stalin regime), and many others. Lenin, whose maternal grandfather, Israel Blank, was Jewish, said that Jews made the best revolutionaries: "The clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him." (Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, p. 112).
Bertrand Russell, initially a supporter of the Revolution, acknowledged this, saying that "Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action." (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (George Allen & Unwin, London 1975), pp. 354-5)
Winston Churchill would assert that "There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews.
In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed, the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.
The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people.
...The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with villainies which are now being perpetrated...Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people." (Illustrated Sunday Herald, Feb. 8, 1920)
An article in the New York Times, Nov. 3, 1999, noted that "...a letter sent to the Vatican by Pius XII in 1919, when he was Bishop Eugenio Pacelli and papal nuncio in Munich...reports on his deputy's unpleasant encounter with Bolshevik revolutionaries who were then terrorizing Catholic priests and the German bourgeoisie. The letter describes the leader, Max Lieven as a '... Russian and a Jew.' The letter also describes Mr. Lieven's companions, '...Jews like the rest of them.'...Bishop Pacelli's description of Jewish Communists...was hardly uncommon 80 years ago."
In the Bolshevik era, 52 percent of the membership of the Soviet communist party was Jewish, though Jews comprised only 1.8 percent of the total population (Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin, p. 81) At least one hundred Soviet generals were Jewish (Canadian Jewish News, April 19, 1989).
The first law passed after the Communists seized power in Russia made anti-semitism a crime punishable by death. in a 1937 interview in the New York Jewish newspaper, Daily Forward, Trotsky said, "The longer the rotten bourgeoisie society lives, the more and more barbaric will anti-Semitism become everywhere."(Izvestia, July 27, 1918). Chaim Bermant, writing in the Jewish Chronicle (Aug. 30, 1991), says: "It was Communism which toppled the hated Czars, Communism which removed Jewish disabilities and proscribed anti-Semitism and Communism which, in its early days at least, opened the doors to Jewish advancement."
According to Jewish researcher John Sack, "In 1945 many Poles felt (and not without reason) that Jews ran the Office of State Security...the chief of the Office was Jacob Berman, a Jew, and all or almost all the department heads were Jews." Sack reports that 75% of the officers of the Communist Secret Police in Silesia were Jews. He noted that many Jews in the Communist terror apparatus in Poland changed their names to Polish ones like General Romkowski, Colonel Rozanski, Capt. Studencki and Lt. Jurkowski. (cf. John Sack, The New Republic, Feb. 14, 1994, p. 6).
The writers of the Jewish Chronicle asserted on April 4th, 1919 that "The ideals of Bolshevism at many points are consonant with the finest ideals of Judaism." The French Jewish newspaper Le Droit de Vivre wrote on May 13, 1933 that "Judaism is the father of Marxism and Communism." Neither Communism nor Zionism would exist in it's modern form were it not for Moses Hess, mentor of Karl Marx.[11]
Solzhenitsyn also accused Jews of wartime cowardice, and evasion of active duty, stating "I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew." while ignoring both the Jewish frontline casualties and the high number of Jews decorated for bravery in battle[12]. He furthermore noted that Jews had a much easier life in the GULAG camps [13].
Richard Pipes review
The book has been described by historian Richard Pipes of Harvard University as "a conscious effort to show empathy for both sides." and exonerating Jews for responsibility for the revolution: "No, in no way can it be said that Jews 'made' the revolution of 1905 or 1917 as it was not made by another nation taken as a whole". At the same time Pipes notes that Solzhenitsyn is "too eager to exonerate czarist Russia of mistreating its Jewish subjects, and as a consequence is insensitive to the Jews' predicament".[14]. In Richard Pipes' opinion, the book absolves Solzhenitsyn from the taint of antisemitism, although he thinks the author’s nationalism prevents him from being fully impartial, and that Solzhenitsyn is using outdated and inadequate sources. Pipes also takes with indignation Solzhenitsyn's refusal to consider "poisonous atmosphere in which Jews lived for generations in the Russian empire (an atmosphere originating in Russian Orthodox and nationalist circles)". Pipes writes, "If there is a discussion in Solzhenitsyn's book of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery that for a century now has been fomenting murderous anti-Semitism worldwide, including in Nazi Germany, I missed it."[14][15]
John Klier review
John Klier, a historian at London's University College, describes the charges of anti-Semitism as "misguided" , but at the same time writes that in his account of the pogroms of the early 20th century, Solzhenitsyn is far more concerned with exonerating the good name of the Russian people than he is with the suffering of the Jews, and he accepts the czarist government's canards blaming the pogroms on provocations by the Jews themselves.[16]
Petrovsky-Shtern critique
Subsequently Solzhenitsyn was criticized by the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern for using unreliable and manipulated figures, while ignoring evidence unfavorable to his own point of view.[17].[17] Petrovsky notes that Solzhenitzyn claims that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded retail trade with contraband, "strangled" Russian merchant class in Moscow (pp. 39–41, 47). Jews lack industriousness ("непроизводительный народ" (pp. 52, 59), that they refuse to engage in factory labor (с. 244-245). They are averse to agriculture, and are unwilling to till the land either in Russia, or in Argentina, or in Palestine (pp. 73, 76, 157, 256, 258, 267-268) and blames Jews' own behavior for pogroms (pp. 210, 483, 120). Solzhenitsyn claims further that Jews use Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy (p. 20), seduce them with rationalism and fashion (p. 21), provoke sectarianism and weaken the fiscal system (p. 70), commit murders on qahal's orders (p. 87), exert undue influence on the prerevolutionary government (p. 57). Petrovsky summarizes his critique that "200 years together is destined to take the place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica."
Zinaida Gimpelevich review
A detailed analysis of 200YT and an overview of critical opinion thereon was published by the University of Waterloo professor Zinaida Gimpelevich. According to Gimpelevich the critical opinion worldwide overwhelmingly tilts against Solzhenitsyn [18].
Vladimir Voynovich critique
In his interview another Russian dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich, specifically describes Two Hundred Years Together as a work that is "long, tedious, and slanderous."[19]
When interviewed for Radio Liberty on the first anniversary of Solzhenitsyn' death, Vladimir Voynovich has stated [20] that Solzhenitshyn harbored antisemitic sentiment all his life, as attested by the 1964 manuscript he later developed into "200 Years Together", and that he deliberately concealed it, because he knew it would have prevented him from receiving the Nobel Prize.
Grigory Baklanov critique
Grigory Baklanov (a Russian novelist) in his critical study described "200 years" as "worthless as historical scholarship"[21]. Baklanov, himself a Second World War veteran, focuses on Solzhenitsyn's insistence on Jews' supposed wartime cowardice and unwillingness to face the enemy, which is contradicted both by the statistics of Jewish frontline casualties and high number of Jews decorated for bravery in battle.
Semyon Reznik review
Another critical analysis was published by the Russian-American historian Semyon Reznik. According to Reznik Solzhenitsyn is careful in his vocabulary, generous in compliments toward Jews and maintains neutral tone throughout, but at the same time he not only condones repressive measures against Jews, but justifies them as intended for protection of the rights of Russians as the titular nation that supposedly "greatly suffered from Jewish exploitation, alcohol mongering, usury and corruption of the traditional way of life". Moreover Reznik notes that Solzhenitsyn uncritically used writings of antisemitic pseudo-historian[22] Andrey Dikiy for his statistical data of Jewish participation in early Soviet government and the security apparatus.[23]
External links
- Online English translation of some chapters
- Interview with Solzhentisyn about "200 Years Together"
- Dimensional Spaces in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together. By Zinaida Gimpelevich.
References
- ^ Dimensional Spaces in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together. By Zinaida Gimpelevich.
- ^ http://berkovich-zametki.com/2006/Zametki/Nomer6/VOstrovsky1.htm
- ^ http://www.sunround.com/club/22/133_chanan.htm
- ^ The Solzhenitsyn Reader, p. 496
- ^ The Solzhenitsyn Reader, pp. 527-555
- ^ The Solzhenitsyn Reader, p. 505
- ^ http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2184898,00.html
- ^ The New Republic, November 25, 2002
- ^ a b Cathy Young: Traditional Prejudices. The anti-Semitism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn Reason Magazine May, 2004.
- ^ Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution The Guardian January 25, 2003.
- ^ Avineri, Shlomo. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism. New York Univ Pr, 1987.
- ^ http://www.jewniverse.ru/biher/AShulman/30.htm
- ^ "200 years together":"... в лагерь присылаешься и узнаёшь: если у тебя удачная нация - ты счастливчик, ты обеспечен, ты выжил... В лагерях, где я сидел... евреям, насколько обобщать можно, жилось легче, чем остальным."
- ^ a b Richard Pipes: "Solzhenitsyn and the Jews, revisited: Alone Together" The New Republic November 25, 2002
- ^ Richard Pipes: Solzhenitsyn's Troubled Prophetic Mission The Moscow Times August 7, 2008. Also in The St. Petersburg Times August 8, 2008.[1]
- ^ "History Today" November 2002
- ^ a b http://ldn-knigi.lib.ru/JUDAICA/Stern200.htm
- ^ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200609/ai_n18622003?tag=rel.res1
- ^ http://www.sem40.ru/interview/hot/9926/
- ^ http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/article/1791697.html?utm_source=gazeta.ru&utm_medium=links&utm_campaign=GazetaRu
- ^ http://lib.ru/PROZA/BAKLANOW/kumir.txt
- ^ http://www.lebed.com/2003/art3563.htm
- ^ http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2002/0415/win/reznik.htm