F. Roger Devlin, "Solzhenitsyn on the Jews and Soviet Russia"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Deux siècles ensemble
Volume 2: Juifs et Russes pendant la periode soviétique
Paris: Fayard, 2003

Early in this second volume of Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explains why the book is a necessary supplement to his principal work on the Revolution, the novel cycle entitled The Red Wheel:

I described the revolution literally hour by hour, and never ceased encountering episodes and discussion of the Jewish theme in the sources. Would I have been right to put all of it into the pages of March 1917? It would not have been the first time in history that a book and its readers succumbed to the facile and crude temptation to throw all the blame on the Jews, their actions, their ideas, to allow oneself to see in them the principal cause of events and thereby avoid the search for the real causes.

To avoid letting the Russians fall for this optical illusion, I systematically muted the Jewish theme throughout the entire Red Wheel, at least in comparison with the way it resonated in the press and hung in the air at the time. (pp. 45–46)

Solzhenitsyn is emphatic that “the February Revolution was not made by the Jews for the Russians; it was certainly carried out by the Russians themselves. . . . We were ourselves the authors of this shipwreck” (pp. 44–45).

Even if not the instigators of the Revolution, the Jews were the subject of its first cascade of “liberating” decrees. The Pale of Settlement, practically nonexistent since the great Russian retreat of 1915, was formally abolished; numerus clausus regulations were dropped; restrictions on the Jewish practice of law and on entry into the officers corps were lifted, etc. Measures were taken against public expressions of anti-Semitism amid widespread false rumors of pogroms in the provinces. All this occurred amid a mood of euphoria soon to dissipate.

The fundamental political fact of the eight-month period between the February Revolution and the Bolshevik coup d’état of October was the uneasy coexistence of two political authorities. A Provisional Government was formed by a group of former Duma deputies and won widespread recognition, if no deep loyalty. At the same time, the “workers’ councils” (or soviets) of the Revolution of 1905 were revived by a small group of socialist intellectuals. They proclaimed themselves the “Executive Committee of the Council of Workers’ Deputies” before any actual council was formed. And their so-called Executive Committee remained a more important body than the council it called into being and in whose name it spoke: plenary sessions of the two- to three-thousand member “Petrograd Soviet” were mostly a forum for empty speechifying.

There were no constitutional rules to define the respective spheres of authority of the Provisional Government and the Soviet’s Executive Committee. What actually happened was that the Executive Committee assumed a “supervisory” role in relation to the Provisional Government, thwarting its purposes at will but refusing to take upon itself the responsibilities of governing. In Solzhenitsyn’s words: “The EC was a shadow government of the worst sort: it deprived the Provisional Government of all real power while criminally avoiding the direct and open assumption of power itself” (p. 46). The result was paralysis at the center and the perfect conditions for an eventual takeover by a determined and ruthless minority.

For several weeks the membership of the Executive Committee was not even divulged:

. . . several of the members hide behind pseudonyms and for two months refused to appear in public: no one knew exactly who was governing Russia. Later it came out that there were ten stupid soldiers in the EC for show, kept at arm’s length. Among the rest—the thirty active members—more than half were Jewish socialists. There were Russians, Caucasians, Latvians, and Poles, but the Russians amounted to less than a quarter of the whole. A moderate socialist, Stankevitch, noted that “the most striking thing about the composition of the EC was the number of foreign elements . . . out of all proportion with their numbers in Petrograd or in the country.” (p. 47)

These men were chosen to represent neither their own nationalities nor the people of Russia, but the various socialist parties: Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and so forth. After June, the EC was replaced by a smaller Central Executive Committee of nine persons: five were Jewish, only one Russian (p. 67).

In view of subsequent events, it has largely been forgotten that most politically active Jews in Russia that year were not involved with these socialist parties at all:

In the course of the summer and autumn of 1917, the Zionist movement continued to gather strength in Russia: in September it had 300,000 adherents. Less known is that Orthodox Jewish organizations enjoyed great popularity in 1917, yielding only to the Zionists and surpassing the socialist parties. (p. 54)

Furthermore, most Jews who did belong to socialist parties were not Bolsheviks: “during the year 1917 Jews were proportionally much more numerous in leading positions among the Mensheviks, right Socialist Revolutionaries, left Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists than among the Bolsheviks” (p. 65). Shortly before the Bolshevik Putsch, however, the Jewish socialists “Natanson, Kamkov, and Steinberg formed an alliance with Trotsky and Kamenev in the name of the left Socialist Revolutionaries” (p. 81). This brief alliance was useful to Lenin in creating the false appearance that the new “Soviet” government was more than a front for the Bolshevik Party.

Solzhenitsyn writes: “It must be stated clearly that the October Putschwas not led by the Jews (except for the glorious Trotsky and the young and dynamic Grigori Chudnovsky)” (p. 80). He remarks that there were also some Jews in the Winter Palace defending the Provisional Government from the Bolsheviks, and recalls meeting one of them in a Soviet prison himself.

The new government’s first challenge was a mass strike of service personnel in support of the deposed Provisional Government. Ministry buildings barred their doors against the new “Soviet Commissars”; Trotsky got laughed out of the Defense Ministry. Most importantly, banks refused Bolshevik demands for funds. In 1919, Lenin specifically credited his Jewish followers for keeping him in power at this point: “immediately after October, it was the Jews who saved the revolution by breaking the resistance of the civil servants” (p. 105).

Lenin’s team claimed at first to be a mere caretaker government pending the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. Elections for such an assembly had been scheduled by the Provisional Government for November 12th, and the Bolsheviks reluctantly allowed them to go ahead in the hope of dominating the resulting body. But their rivals the Socialist Revolutionary Party won a large majority. Most Jewish voters supported Zionist parties. The Constituent Assembly was forcibly dispersed the night after it convened, January 6, 1918, and all Bolshevik pretenses to democratic legitimacy were scrapped.

During these critical first months, Lenin had no reliable Russian troops; his only armed force was a Latvian rifle brigade which he assigned to the Jewish commissar Nachimson.

The author discusses some of the arguments used by Jewish apologists to excuse or palliate Jewish involvement in Bolshevik rule. He accepts the common argument that the Jewish Bolsheviks were renegades, i.e., “not Jews in spirit.” He points out, however, that the same was true of Russian Bolsheviks and denies that any nation may simply disown its renegades: “for if we release ourselves from all responsibility for the actions of our national kin, the very concept of a nation loses any real meaning” (p. 132).

There are many Jewish authors who to this very day either deny the support of Jews for Bolshevism, or even reject it angrily, or else—the most common case—only speak defensively about it. The matter is well-attested, however: these Jewish renegades were for several years leaders at the center of the Bolshevik Party, at the head of the Red Army (Trotsky), of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Sverdlov), of the two capitals (Zinoviev and Kamenev), of the Comintern (Zinoviev), of the Profintern (Dridzo-Lozovsky), and of the Komsomol (Oskar Ryvkin, then Lazar Shatskin). (p. 91)

Marxists are officially “internationalists,” of course, and Trotsky was especially emphatic in rejecting his ethnic heritage. But does it necessarily follow that he was not influenced by it? “To judge by the appointments he made,” Solzhenitsyn observes, “Jewish renegades were closer to him than Russian renegades” (p. 92). Particularly striking was his appointment of the incompetent Jewish doctor Sklianski to a high post in the Commissariat of War.

The author goes on to discuss the roles of the Jews Uritsky, Drabkin, and Sverdlov in dispersing the Constituent Assembly, concluding with one of his strongest formulations: “by these sorts of operations the new Jewish form of government was sketched out” (p. 93).

He reproduces the remarks of some contemporary observers:

F. Nazhivin records the impressions he received at the very beginning of Soviet power: at the Kremlin in the administration of the Sovnarkom “you see nothing but Latvians upon Latvians, Jews upon Jews. I have never been an anti-Semite, but here there were so many it leapt out at you, and each one younger than the next.”

[The writer Vladimir] Korolenko himself, liberal and hypertolerant as he was, entered into his Journal in the Spring of 1919: “Among the Bolsheviks there are a great number of Jewish men and women. Their tactlessness, their self-assurance are striking and irritating. . . . In their ranks, and above all in the Cheka [the secret police], you constantly see Jewish physiognomies, and this exacerbates the still virulent traditional feelings of Judeophobia [among the population].” (p. 99)

Another witness quoted by Solzhenitsyn specifies that most of the heads of prisons were Poles and Latvians, while “the section charged with combating black marketers—the least dangerous and most lucrative—was in the hands of Jews” (p. 94). Jews are also said to have been unusually noticeable in the organs charged with provisioning (p. 97). Solzhenitsyn lists the names of ten Jewish bankers who provided important financial services for the Bolsheviks (p. 115).

Some Jews were also implicated in the murder of the Imperial family, notably Sverdlov (who transmitted the order from Moscow) and Urovsky (who led the execution squad), but Solzhenitsyn believes the point has been exaggerated in recent years by certain Russian nationalists “who take a morbid pleasure in this agonizing thought” (p. 100). Most of the executioners were Hungarian prisoners of war; final responsibility for the crime rested, of course, with Lenin.

The Bolshevik Putsch led to a split in Jewish parties such as the Bund and the Zionist-Socialists. Those who would not support Lenin either emigrated or were suppressed. But the left wings of two Zionist-Socialist groupings joined the Communist Party en masse in 1919 and 1921. And the left wing of the Bund simply dissolved, with many of its members joining the Communists. According to an internal Party survey of 1926, 2,500 Bundists had become Party members. Many Mensheviks, Jewish and otherwise, did likewise. Most of these persons would face persecution under Stalin (pp. 118–19).

There were Jews who resisted Soviet power. “But,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “they did not have any way of making themselves heard publicly, and the present pages are naturally filled not with their names but with those who guided the course of events” (p. 123). He relates the stories of two Jews who are known to have sacrificed their lives fighting the new regime. Leonid Kannegiesser assassinated Moisei Uritsky, a Jewish Chekist, explaining in a letter to his sister that (among other motives) he was ashamed to see Jews helping to install the Bolsheviks in power. Alexander Abramovich Vilenkin, four-times decorated cavalry officer, was shot in 1918 for belonging to a clandestine anti-Bolshevik Organization.

“These combatants of Bolshevism, whatever may have been their motivation—we honor their memory as Jews. We deplore that there were so few of them, just as the White forces in the Civil War were too few” (p. 125).

In 1918 [writes Solzhenitsyn] Trotsky, with the aid of Sklianski and Yakov Sverdlov, created the Red Army. Jewish soldiers were numerous in its ranks. Several units of the Red Army were composed entirely of Jews, as, e.g., the brigade commanded by Joseph Forman. Among the officers of the Red Army, the share of Jews grew in number and importance for many years after the Civil War. (p. 135)

According to one of the author’s Jewish sources, “the proportion of Jews in the position of Political Adjuncts was especially high at all levels of the Red Army” (p. 136).

Of special interest to students of Communism is the Cheka, the secret political police who carried out the Red Terror and eventually built the Gulag. In their early phase, national minorities composed almost 50 percent of the central apparatus of the Cheka, and nearly 70 percent of the responsible posts. An inventory on 25 September 1918 reveals, besides a great number of Latvians and a not insignificant number of Poles, a good showing by Jews. And of the judges assigned to the struggle against counter-revolution—by far the most important section in the structure of the Cheka—half were Jews (pp. 142–43).

The Ukrainian Cheka, in what used to be the Pale of Settlement, was composed about 80 percent of Jews (p. 150). In Kiev, which was 21 percent Jewish in 1919 (p. 156), key positions in the Cheka were “almost exclusively” in Jewish hands. Of the twenty members of the commission which decided people’s fate, fourteen were Jews (p. 148).

The Kievan Cheka even published a newsletter, The Red Sword; it offers an unusual glimpse into the minds of those who carried out the Terror. In an article by its Jewish editor-in-chief Leon Kraini we read: “For us there cannot be any question of encumbering ourselves with old principles of morality and humanitarianism invented by the bourgeoisie.” A certain Schwartz echoes his sentiments: “The Red Terror which has been proclaimed must be carried out in a proletarian fashion. . . . If in order to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat in the whole world it is necessary to annihilate all the servants of tsarism and capitalism, we will not hesitate to do so” (p. 141).

Vasily Shulgin, an old political ally of Stolypin, witnessed an enormous exodus from Kiev on October 1st, 1919 as the town was about to be occupied by the Bolsheviks. Some 60,000 Russians, according to his estimate, left on foot with nothing more than they could carry. At the time, there were some 100,000 Jews living in Kiev. “But there were no Jews in this exodus; you could not see any among these thousands of Russians. They did not want to share our destiny.” Even the wealthiest “bourgeois” Jews preferred to take their chances with the Bolsheviks (pp. 149–50).

Sergei Maslov, author of Russia after Four Years of Revolution, reports: “In the towns of southern Russia, especially the Western half of the Ukraine which changed hands several times, the advent of Soviet power gave rise to ostentatious sympathy and the greatest joy in the Jewish quarters, and often nowhere else” (p. 150).

One of the best promoted legends about the Russian Revolution concerns “the pogroms carried out by the White Armies” during the Civil War. Solzhenitsyn devotes several pages to examining this widely received notion.

In the first place, it is important to understand that Reds and Whites were not the only forces fighting in Southern Russia at this time. There was a powerful Ukrainian separatist movement under the leadership of Symon Petliura. There were also a number of private armed bands responsible to no one but themselves. These were led by local bosses (Solzhenitsyn names ten), and operated mainly in rural areas. Some described themselves as “Blacks” or “Greens,” and opposed both the White and Red Armies. The entire scene was extremely chaotic, and it can be a difficult chore for the historian to figure out exactly who was where when.

The pogroms which occurred across the whole of Southern Russia during this period were “unprecedented in their cruelty and numbers of victims” (p. 134)—out of all proportion to anything which had been seen in 1881–82, 1903, or 1905–06. Early Soviet sources speak of 180,000–200,000 victims and more than 300,000 orphaned children. The more recent Jewish Encyclopedia records that “according to various estimates between 70,000 and 180,000–200,000 perished” (p. 172). Who was responsible for these atrocities?

Collating various Jewish sources, a contemporary historian estimates the number of mass pogroms at 900, among which 40 percent were carried out by the forces of Petliura and the [Ukrainian National] Directory, 25 percent by [irregular] detachments commanded by Ukrainian bosses, 17 percent by Denikin’s [White] Armies, and 8.5 percent by Budienny’s First Cavalry and other Red forces. (pp. 172–73)

In other words, the great majority of pogroms of this period were not connected with the White movement at all. Those carried out by Ukrainian separatist forces were not only the most numerous but also distinguished for their deliberate cruelty and the methodical extermination of women, children, and the elderly. Sometimes they were not even accompanied by pillaging (p. 160).

And, in spite of Lenin’s declared intentions, the Red forces did not remain innocent:

In the Spring of 1918 [before the other forces had gotten started!—FRD], pogroms accompanied by the slogan “down with the Jews and the bourgeois!” were fomented by Red Army detachments returning from Ukraine. Particularly cruel were the pogroms perpetrated by the First Cavalry at the end of August 1920 during their retreat from Poland. But these pogroms fomented by the Red Army have remained nearly hidden from history. (p. 173)

So what about that 17 percent of pogroms due to the White Army?

Solzhenitsyn devotes eleven pages to the story of the Jews and the White movement. This material is difficult to summarize. The author quotes divergent and even contradictory testimonies without always taking sides. At one moment the subject is the “Volunteer Army,” a little farther along it the “White Army.” The reader is never told that the former was a part of the latter, nor what the other parts were.

A recent scholarly study affirms that “in its first year of existence [1918], the White movement was practically free of any anti-Semitism. . . . But in 1919 [the decisive year of the war] things changed radically” (p. 163). The White Army was hypnotized by Trotsky and Nakhamkis [editor of Izvestia], which led it to identify Bolshevism as a whole with the Jews. The divisions fighting in Ukraine were probably also influenced by the local tradition of anti-Semitism (p. 164).

The Jewish doctor Daniel Pasmanik, who served the Whites for a time, recalled:

The Volunteer Army systematically refused to accept into its ranks Jewish ensigns and cadets, including those who had valiantly fought the Bolsheviks in October 1917. This was a severe moral blow to the Jews. I will never forget when eleven Jewish ensigns came to see me in Simferopol to complain that they had been excluded from the armed service and relegated to the rear as cooks. (p. 168)

Linski reports that Jews were not allowed to occupy administrative functions, nor accepted in the propaganda department of the Volunteer Army. But he denies that the Army published anti-Semitic propaganda or let attacks against Jews go unpunished (p. 169).

The Volunteer Army was, both militarily and morally, the soundest part of the White forces in Southern Russia. But they were insufficient to stand up to the Red Army by themselves. A number of Cossack divisions were enrolled to fight in the Ukraine, to the West of the Volunteers. These men were motivated by the desire for plunder as much as by opposition to bolshevism. It was in their area that most (perhaps all) of the “White pogroms” occurred.[1]

General Denikin, overall leader of the White forces in Southern Russia, expressed shame over the pogroms committed by men nominally under his command, and no historian seems to suspect him of having ordered them (although some argue that he might have done more to stop them).

It is frequently asserted that the conduct of the White Army virtually forced the Jews of Southern Russia to side with the Bolsheviks. Solzhenitsyn remarks: “We cannot say that nothing drove them to make this choice; we also cannot say there was no other solution” (p. 149). In any case, it is difficult to see how the Whites could have forced anyone to take an active role in the Cheka.

Strengthening the public perception of Bolshevism as a Jewish movement were the brief Communist takeovers of Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. The proportion of Jews in the Bolshevik movement in Hungary was said to be about 95 percent; in the German Communist Party it was also greatly out of proportion. “That the directors of the communist revolts were Jews—this was one of the main reasons for the revival of political anti-Semitism in post-revolutionary Germany” (p. 153). In the 1920s, “the assimilation of Bolshevism to Judaism became a fashion followed by everyone,” i.e., it was not peculiar to traditionally anti-Semitic milieus (p. 188).

About two million persons fled Bolshevik Russia during the years 1918–22, with most settling in Western Europe. As Russia fell eerily silent—apart from the monotonous drone of the regime itself—all aspects of the revolution continued to be enthusiastically debated among the exiles, both Jewish and Gentile. Jews numbered some 200,000 among the refugees (i.e., 10 percent), and about half of them went to Germany. They were particularly active in the field of publishing: “In 1922, these publishers brought out more Russian books and publications [in Berlin] than German language editors did in all of Germany” (pp. 182–83). A surprising number of the Jewish exiles continued to cherish an idealized image of Soviet Russia as a promised land of equality and social justice. Among the Jewish refugees who settled in the United States, notes the Jewish Encyclopedia, “pro-Bolshevik ideas had no difficulty proliferating” (p. 196). “One cannot say that the Jewish emigration [as a whole] was pro-Bolshevik,” concludes Solzhenitsyn, “but for it the Bolshevik regime was not the principal enemy, and many were those who maintained a benevolent attitude towards it” (p. 196).

M. Biekerman relates a characteristic anecdote:

When a well-known Jewish public figure proposed to a Jewish religious dignitary, in one of the European capitals, to organize a meeting to protest the execution of Orthodox priests in Russia, the latter, upon reflection, answered that this amounted to combating the Bolsheviks, which he considered it impossible to do since the fall of Bolshevism would lead to the return of pogroms. (p. 198)

This Biekerman, along with Pasmanik and Linski, helped to found an extraordinary group called “The Patriotic Alliance of Russian Jews.” In 1923 they issued a manifesto stating that “for the Jews as for all the nations which inhabit Russia, Bolshevism is the worst of all possible evils” (p. 200).

Jews must fight those who are perverting Russia, shoulder-to-shoulder with all anti-Bolsheviks. A fraternal combat against a common enemy will clear the air and considerably weaken the wave of anti-Semitism which has been unleashed. (p. 203)

Later that year this group had published in Berlin a six-author volume entitled Russia and the Jews. Says Solzhenitsyn:

In the entire history of relations between Jews and Russians, I know of nothing comparable to this collection. For the Jews in the emigration, it had the effect of a bomb. Just imagine how painful it was to hear these words from Jewish mouths, from within the Jewish world.

As for us Russians, we should not take this collection lightly. On the contrary, it should serve as an example for us: of how, even while loving one’s own people, one may speak of one’s own errors and, where necessary, do so without indulgence. And without placing oneself apart, without dissociating oneself from one’s people. (p. 204)

Solzhenitsyn makes extensive use of this group of writers as sources throughout the first half of his second volume. Admirable as they may have been, they were isolated voices within the Jewish emigration. The author fills a page and a half with the dismissive or vituperative comments they elicited from other Jews (pp. 209–10).

The decade of the 1920s also witnessed a mass migration of Jews from the former Pale toward the cities of Central Russia: ordinary Russians spoke (or perhaps whispered) of a Jewish “conquest” of the cities. For example, in 1920 there were 28,000 Jews in Moscow; in 1923 there were 86,000; in 1926, 131,000; in 1933, 226,500. City residence allowed them better access to consumer goods and to professional advancement (pp. 218, 224).

Jewish representation in the Communist Party was about proportional to their share of theurban population. But with 83 percent of Jews living in towns, they were one of the most urbanized nationalities in the Soviet Union. So overall they were overrepresented in Party ranks by a factor of about 6.5 (p. 219).

The four largest nationalities represented in the Party in 1922 were Russians (72 percent), Ukrainians (5.9 percent), Jews (5.2 percent), and Latvians (2.5 percent). This means that for one thousand Russians there were 3.8 Communists, while for one thousand Jews there were 8.1. The disproportion was greater at higher levels in the Party. Jews made up 18.3 percent of the voting delegates at the XIth Party Congress that year, and 26 percent of the new Central Committee elected by this Congress (pp. 225–26).

During these years, the role of national minorities in the secret police declined overall: from 50 percent at the time of the Red Terror to 30–35 percent by the mid-1920s. Even so, the number of Jews continued to increase (pp. 227–28).

New class origin criteria for admission to universities were established. The sons of even “petty bourgeois” Russians—shopkeepers and such—were barred from advancement. On the other hand

. . . these discriminatory measures were not extended to Jews because they belonged to a “nation persecuted by the tsarist regime.” The Jewish youth, even ofbourgeois origin, were greeted with open arms in the universities. Jews were forgiven for not being proletarian. (p. 221)

Thus, 15.4 percent of students enrolled in institutions of higher learning in 1926–27 were Jewish, while Jews constituted just 1.82 percent of the population. The situation was even more lopsided than these numbers reveal, because the Russians who did get admitted were “proletarians,” i.e., not the cognitive elite of the Russian nation.

Such circumstances were both noticed and resented by the rest of the population. The “new anti-Semitism” was not a continuation of the pre-Revolutionary variety, but affected demographic groups that had been entirely free of anti-Semitism in earlier days. The matter went undiscussed in the official Soviet press for several years.

Exposés first appeared in Paris by 1922. The revelations of socialists Yekaterina Kuskova and Sergei Maslov profoundly shocked the exiled intelligentsia, for whom it had always been an article of faith that anti-Semitism was caused by “autocracy.”

Even among the children of radical families, wrote Kuskova, all the talk is of the Jewish invasion: “they have shown their true face, they have made us suffer!” She maintained that an actual majority of the population had become anti-Semitic, and the younger generation more than their elders.

Maslov stated that “the power of the Yids” was a common expression. “Among the reasons for this universal Judeophobia,” he explained, “is the Jews’ strong national solidarity” which “appears especially in the recruitment of administrative agents.” In a Jewish functionary: “Soviet power reveals its bad side most ostentatiously. The intoxication of power acts more strongly on Jews” (pp. 241–44).

The New Economic Policy (NEP), launched by Lenin in the spring of 1921, was a tactical retreat on the economic front which allowed limited private enterprise while the Communists strengthened their political grip on the country. This reversal of policy created, as an unintended effect, new occasions for Judeophobia. Solzhenitsyn remarks:

One often saw Jews among those who first enriched themselves under NEP. The hatred directed against them was also due to their operating within the field of Soviet institutions, not only those of the market: many of their undertakings were made easier by the relations they enjoyed with those in the Soviet apparatus. (p. 255)

Beginning around 1926, the regime openly admitted the existence of the “new anti-Semitism” and sought to combat it. A leader in this counter-attack was Yuri Larin, previously best known as the man behind “War Communism,” the policies which wrecked the Russian economy between 1918 and 1921. In 1929, he published a book on The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR. He reports hearing questions such as these in communist meetings: “Why don’t you see Jews in waiting lines? Why are the Jews rich? Why do they have their own bakeries? Why do the Jews seek out easy work? Why do they avoid physical work? Why do the Jews help each other out, while Russians do not?” (p. 246). A current saying in Moscow ran: “Siberia for the Russians, Crimea for the Jews” (p. 245).

With typical Bolshevik paranoia, Larin thought he could glimpse behind these suggestions “the hand of a clandestine counter-revolutionary organization . . . systematic propaganda orchestrated by secret organizations emanating from the White Army” (which, of course, had been driven out of Russia nine years before [pp. 246, 251]). Larin recommended applying “Lenin’s Law,” meaning a decree of 1918 authorizing the shooting of anti-Semites without trial.

In fact, the Soviet Penal Code of 1926 contained provisions against “incitement to national hatred and divisiveness” [have the EU bureaucrats been studying Soviet law?], expanded in 1927 to include “diffusion, authorship or possession of written documents” (p. 252, italics added). Solzhenitsyn remarks: “The most rabid anti-Semite could not have discovered a better means of getting the people to identify Soviet power with that of the Jews” (p. 253).

There were also, of course, plenty of ordinary Jews who had been left behind and forgotten by the revolution: older people attached to the old places and ways, or families with numerous children. They sank into utter destitution, completely dependent on charity from abroad (which was still operating in the 1920s). G. Simon, an older émigré who returned as an American businessman in the late 1920s, published a book about these forgotten Jews under the sarcastic title The Jews Reign in Russia: “The only refuge for Jews,” he wrote, “is the graveyard” (pp. 253–54, 257).

The idea of making farmers out of the Jews was once again in fashion during the 1920s. It did not originate with the Jews themselves but was based upon ideological considerations. Ignoring the decades-long efforts of the previous century, the Party claimed that Jews had been prevented from taking up agriculture, and so forced to become “exploiters.” Extensive lands were set aside for them in the Crimea, and money poured in from abroad. The regime sought by this means to steal the Zionists’ thunder and tie the fate of the Jews even more firmly to that of Soviet rule. These Crimean lands were taken back just a few years later at the time of collectivization (pp. 262–68).

A more serious effort concerned the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidjan on the Chinese border in Eastern Siberia. This territory was once described by Khrushchev as a fertile land with a southern climate, well-watered and sunny, with immense forests and rivers brimming with fish. A more objective source calls it a “partly marshy stretch of taiga.” Great efforts were made in the 20s and 30s to encourage Jews to settle there, but the majority either returned home or moved on to larger cities such as Vladivostok (pp. 268–70). This Jewish Autonomous Region still nominally exists, with a Jewish population of just over 1 percent.

In the first years of the new regime there existed a “Jewish Section” within the Party, “more fanatical than the Soviet authorities themselves, and sometimes ahead of them in their projects.” But there seemed to be contradictory tendencies to the Jewish Sections’ activity:

On the one hand, an intense activity of communist propaganda in Yiddish, a pitiless war against Judaism, traditional Jewish education, independent Jewish organizations, political parties and movements, Zionism and Hebrew [“a reactionary and counter-revolutionary language”]. On the other hand, a refusal of assimilation, support for the Yiddish language and culture, the organization of a Soviet Jewish system of education, Jewish scientific research, and action to improve the economic condition of Soviet Jews. (p. 271)

Many members of the Jewish Section were former Bund members. One Jewish author remarks approvingly that “under the proletarian sauce, [the action of the Jewish section] carried the clear mark of Jewish national identity” (p. 272). For a time, important works on pre-Revolutionary Jewish history were supported by the Jewish Section; Solzhenitsyn makes use of some of this material himself in his first volume. There was also a very active Yiddish Theater scene, which lasted into the 1930s, and heavy Jewish involvement in early Soviet Cinema that went far beyond the well-known works of Eisenstein.

The Jewish Section took a special interest in combating its ideological rival, Zionism. They lobbied the regime to take a hard line with an ideology so incompatible with Marxist internationalism, but for several years the upper echelons of the Party showed unwonted leniency in the matter. Zionists maintained a Central Bureau in Moscow until 1924. One Zionist party, Poalei-Zion, was officially permitted to exist until 1928. Harsh punishments for Zionist activity were relatively rare, in part because the Zionists had so many friends abroad.

The Jewish religion was not (as is sometimes asserted) spared persecution during these years, but the regime’s policies were certainly milder and less consistent here than in regard to Orthodox Christianity. The fanatics of the Jewish Section called upon the Party to adopt a policy of “equal persecution” for Judaism, but this took a long time to happen. Synagogues are said to have been more numerous at the end of the 20s than in 1917: two new Synagogues were constructed in Moscow. Prayer books and religious calendars continued to be published. The authorities occasionally even permitted unleavened bread to be imported for Passover celebrations.

The central Synagogues of Vitebsk, Minsk, Gomel, Karkhov, Bobruisk, and Kiev, however, were all closed. Others were plundered: although Synagogues typically contained fewer valuables than Christian Churches, menorahs were frequently made of silver. In 1921, the Jewish Section of Kiev organized a bizarre “public trial of Judaism,” culminating in a “death sentence” handed down by Jewish Communists. This “trial” was later repeated in other towns. Heders and yeshivot were ordered closed, but continued to operate clandestinely for many years. The Jewish Sections arranged things so that Jews’ days off work never fell on the Sabbath. On the high holy days, they sometimes entered Synagogues to disrupt services.

Solzhenitsyn concludes: “in those years, we all wanted to chase out God” (p. 287). He says surprisingly little about the brutal campaign against the Orthodox Church or any Jewish role in it.

In 1926, the Party downgraded the Jewish Section to a Jewish Bureau. In 1930, it was altogether abolished. (Other national “Sections” were suffering the same fate around the same time.)

Despite their unfortunate history as agriculturalists, many Jews obtained high positions in the Commissariat of Agriculture. There are bizarre stories of peasants being ordered by these authorities to shear their sheep at the onset of the Russian Winter or receiving roasted Sunflower seeds for planting (p. 243). Eventually, Commissars with Jewish names such as Schlichter, Epstein, and Kritzman were to preside over collectivization, destroying the independence of the peasants who constituted 80 percent of the Russian population (pp. 292–93).

In summarizing the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union of the 20s, Solzhenitsyn writes:

A myth is in course of formation: “the Jews were always second class citizens under the Soviet regime.” And rare indeed are those who are willing to admit not only the participation of Jews in the deeds perpetrated by the barbaric young State, but also the virulence which certain of them demonstrated.

In the 1990s, a Jewish author [G. Shurmak] declared: “For decades, Jews were proud of their compatriots who made a brilliant career out of the revolution, without much reflecting upon what that career cost the Russian people in real suffering. . . . It is striking with what unanimity my compatriots deny any responsibility in the Russian history of the twentieth century.”

Words like these could be salvation for our two peoples if they were not so hopelessly rare. Because it is the truth: in the course of the twenties, numerous were the Jews who rushed to serve the Bolshevik Moloch, without thinking of the unhappy country which would provide the field for their experiments any more than of the consequences which would result for themselves. (pp. 298–99)

By the end of the 1920s, the New Economic Policy had served its purpose. Stalin, now an unrivalled dictator, inaugurated a policy of collectivization and industrialization. This required an influx of technical expertise from abroad, most especially from the United States. Ignoring Marx’s inconvenient teaching that capitalism was always the deadly enemy of socialism, the Soviet Union traded enthusiastically with the West, most often getting equipment and technical expertise in exchange for raw materials.

Before the Revolution, American financiers had refused, at considerable cost to themselves, to have dealings with the “barbaric” Russia of pogroms and Jewish Settlement Laws. But the Soviet campaign against Zionism and Judaism met with little indignation in the West. The general impression was that the Soviet regime was not oppressing the Jews—and was maintaining them in positions of power. The regime did what it could to reinforce this impression. In 1931 Stalin issued for the foreign press a special statement condemning anti-Semitism. And in 1936, Molotov delivered the following tirade (as Solzhenitsyn calls it) to the XVIIIth Party Congress:

Our fraternal sentiments with regard to the Jewish people come from their having given birth to the genius who conceived the communist liberation of humanity [Marx], from their having given the world eminent men in the domain of science, technology, the arts, and valiant heroes of the revolutionary struggle and, in our country, they have produced and still produce new directors and remarkable organizers whose talents are exercised in every branch of the edification and defense of the cause of socialism. (p. 304)

These words may have been intended to mark off the Soviet regime from Hitlerism in the eyes of the West, says Solzhenitsyn, but they also correspond to reality.

Today, the author asserts, it is often stated in Russia that the Jews were chased out of key positions in the 30s and had no further part in the direction of the country. Solzhenitsyn, however, denies that any significant decline in Jewish power occurred before the Great Purge of 1937–38, and provides statistics to back up the claim: e.g., the participation of Jews in the Party’s Central Committee held steady at one-sixth from 1930 to 1934. In the Commissariats of Commerce and Provisioning, Jewish participation hovered between one-third and one-half. A contemporary historian, L. Krichevsky, has written that “the first half of the 30s is marked by an increase in the role of Jews within the security organs [the secret police]. On the eve of the most massive repressions [1937–38], 407 high-level Chekists received decorations: among them, 56 (13.8 percent) were Jews” (p. 314).

The author famously included pictures of six Jewish Chekists of the 30s as an illustration in The Gulag Archipelago. This is what first gave rise to the legend of “Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism.” In the present book he tells us the story behind these pictures: he did not collect and assemble them himself, but copied the set of six directly from a self-glorifying album the security organs themselves published in 1936! (pp. 317, 363).

We must not leave out the story of Isaï Davidovich Berg, inventor of the gas chamber on wheels. Frustrated at the inability of the execution squad to keep up with the numbers of “counter-revolutionaries” his men kept bringing them, this dedicated Chekist developed a vehicle which could deliver victims ready for burial. It was disguised as a bread-van. In spite of his inventiveness, Berg himself was shot in 1939.

The author reviews more than one attempt to portray the Jewish Communists of the 1930s as victims. Solomon Schwartz asserts that “under Soviet conditions, [the Jews] had no chance to survive except State service,” to which Solzhenitsyn responds:

One is ashamed to read this. What sort of situation of oppression and despair is it which leaves you no other chance of survival than to occupy positions of privilege? What about the rest of the population? They enjoyed full liberty to wear themselves out on collective farms and in prison camps, digging ditches with pickaxes, carrying loads on the sites of the five-year plans . . . (p. 335)

Jews, being so prominent in the Party, were numerous among those killed in the Great Purge of 1937–38. Before it, they had been at the head of 50 percent of the principal services for internal affairs; by January 1, 1939 they occupied only 6 percent of these positions (p. 320). It is remarkable that no one seems to assert a specifically anti-Semitic motive behind the purge, although Stalin certainly had no fondness for Jews.

The Israeli writer Yu. Margolin is another who tries to engage our sympathy for the Jewish Communists, “victims of the Soviet dictatorship, used and then liquidated without pity when they were no longer useful.” Solzhenitsyn is not buying it:

A lovely explanation! But were these persons really used for twenty years? Did they not pour all their zeal into being the engine of that same dictatorship, and before being “no longer useful,” did they not take a vigorous part in the destruction of religion and culture, in the annihilation of the intelligentsia and several million peasants? (p. 323)

For the same reasons, he has little pity for purged Jewish Chekists: “one cannot agree—it would not be decent, not honest—to include among the persecutions of the Jews the fact that they were chased out of the organs of repression” (p. 322).
The years following the Great Purge saw the continued decline in Jewish Party membership, as well as the closing of many of the remaining synagogues. In 1939, thenumerus clausus system was reintroduced for Jews in Soviet Universities. Nevertheless, “up to the war, the great majority of Soviet Jews remained sympathetic to Soviet ideology and in agreement with the regime” (p. 348). And the sympathy of European Jews for the Soviet Union experienced a new upsurge in these years, courtesy of Hitler. During the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, following the German invasion of Western Poland, some two million Jews fled east into the Soviet Union.

At this point in his narrative, the author includes a chapter on the Jews’ situation within the Gulag, the “archipelago” of prison camps scattered across Soviet Russia. He begins:

If I had never spent time there myself, I would not have been able to write this chapter. Before camp, I thought like everyone else: one must not notice nationality; there are no nations, just humanity. But they send you to camp and you learn that if you belong to a good nation you are lucky, you can rest easy, you will survive. But if your nation is that of everyone—there is no use blaming anybody for the consequences. (p. 357)

In the Soviet camps, the Russians were the “nation of everyone.” More compact or tribally-minded peoples managed to look out for one another in the harsh conditions of camp life, and so stood a better chance of survival.

Readers of The Gulag Archipelago will recall the “trusties,” prisoners who collaborated with their keepers in return for favors which to outsiders may seem ridiculously small, but which often meant the difference between life and death. (The young Solzhenitsyn, still a believer in Communism, actually served as a trusty in the early part of his time in the camps—a story he relates at length in The Gulag Archipelago.)

Trusties were often chosen on the basis of nationality:

Any old prisoner who has had the full experience of camp life will confirm that certain nationalities were much better represented among the trusties than among the general prison population. Thus, you found almost no Balts, although they were quite numerous among the prisoners. There were always Russians, of course, but in a small proportion compared to their numbers in the camp (and they had often been recruited among the bien-pensants of the Party). On the other hand, there were many Jews, Armenians, Georgians; also a lot of Azerbaijanis and Caucasian mountain people. (p. 357)

On this subject Solzhenitsyn writes something which has evoked more outrage among Russian Jews than anything else in his thousand-page work:

If I had wanted to generalize by saying that the Jews in the camps had a particularly harsh life, no one would have stopped me, and I would not have been covered with reproaches for having generalized unjustly. But in the camps I knew it was different: insofar as one can generalize, the Jews lived there with less hardship than others. (pp. 358–59)

He relates the story of a Latvian with the convenient name Bernstein, one of his informants in writing The Gulag Archipelago, who believes he only survived the camp because in the most difficult times he could turn to the Jews for help (p. 360).

Once again, Solzhenitsyn digs up an example of a Jewish author writing of the Jewish collaborators with sympathy rather than shame: a certain unfortunate named Belinkov “got cast out among the most despised category, the ‘trusties.’” The author comments: “one must have lost all sense of humor to write [such a thing]. Cast out among the trusties—what an expression! ‘Lowered to the masters?’” (p. 359).

Solzhenitsyn also tells us about the Jews Vladimir Efroimson and Yakov Davidovich Grodzensky who refused to become trusties when they could have. Efroimson wished to dissipate the animosity toward Jews in the camp resulting from so many being trusties. The Jewish trusties mocked him and resented him for making them look bad. The rest explained his behavior by saying that he was not a “real” Jew, or was a “degenerate” Jew. Solzhenitsyn comments:

Animated by the highest motives, Efroimson and Grodzensky did the noblest and most just thing any Jews could do—loyally share the common fate . . . and they were not understood by either side! For it is always this way in History: the paths of self-limitation, renunciation of oneself, are arduous—they lend themselves to sarcasm—but they are the only paths which can save humanity.

As for me, I shall never forget these examples, and shall put my hope in them. (p. 365)

Most of Solzhenitsyn’s Jewish sources concede that the Soviet authorities did a commendable job of evacuating Jews from the western regions of Russia at the beginning of the German invasion of 1941, given the constraints upon transport and the other urgent demands being made upon it. About 2,226,000 Jews were successfully evacuated. Another 2,739,000 Jews, mostly from borderlands recently reacquired following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had to be left to face the German occupation (p. 375).

“During 1941–42,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “the Soviet authorities gladly allowed the synagogues of Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov to fill up and the Jewish Passover to be celebrated” (p. 379). Yiddish newspapers were published again. A Jewish Antifascist Committee was set up to publicize anti-Jewish atrocities committed by the invaders: “the effect produced in the West surpassed all Moscow’s expectations. . . . In allied countries, Jewish organizations were created to gather funds for the Red Army” (p. 383). The Soviet regime even cooperated with the Zionist movement for several years.

Popular anti-Semitism increased during the war years. It was commonly asserted, e.g., that Jews avoided service at the front. Solzhenitsyn goes through the statistics carefully and concludes that such accusations are unfounded. He presents evidence that some 430,000 Jews fought in the Red Army during the war, with 270 Jewish Generals and Admirals among them (pp. 388–98).

Part of the German plan of occupation was to get the local populations to initiate pogroms. This was intended to create the impression that anti-Jewish actions were undertaken spontaneously by the nations which Germany had “liberated from Jewish Bolshevism.” In their reports to Berlin, however, SS officials reported that this task was “quite difficult” in Lithuania, “much more difficult” in Latvia, and impossible in Byelorussia. Neither did they have success when they reached Great Russia. In Ukraine, the German plan enjoyed some success, especially among the Ukrainian separatists, but the SS had to take matters into their own hands eventually. Only the Crimean Tatars proved zealous in massacring the local Jews. On the whole, the German attempt to hide behind proxies was a failure (pp. 403–408).

There is nothing in Solzhenitsyn’s pages which could serve as grist for the mill of “holocaust revisionism,” nor does he ever suggest that German National Socialism was preferable to Soviet Communism.

As is widely recognized, the postwar years up to the death of Stalin were marked by an official campaign against the Jews. This was the responsibility of the dictator himself, as Solzhenitsyn explains:

[T]he very structure of the totalitarian regime meant that the weakening of the Jewish share in the leadership of the country could only be initiated by Stalin himself.

But neither Stalin’s devious character nor the hardened character of Soviet propaganda allowed an open course of action. The first transformations in the composition of the State apparatus occurred—almost imperceptibly, it is true—after the rapprochement of Stalin with Hitler in 1939. The Jew Litvinov was replaced by Molotov and “purges” took place in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. And military and diplomatic academies were closed to Jews.

From the end of 1942, actions were taken to remove Jews from artistic institutions such as the Bolshoi, the Moscow Conservatory, [and] the Moscow Philharmonic. Later there were attempts to initiate a prorated repartitioning of [Party] cadres according to national origin, which in practice amounted to removing Jews from decision-making positions. Over the course of the years and according to circumstances, Stalin sometimes encouraged and sometimes hindered these initiatives. (pp. 424–25)

An important turning point was the arrival of Golda Meir in Moscow as Israeli ambassador. She received a triumphal welcome from the entire Jewish community, and petitions for emigration to Israel began pouring in to the authorities. Meanwhile, as Stalin was preparing for a possible war with the United States, the Israeli government was sending out pro-Western signals. Jews arrested around 1950 are said to have been confronted by their interrogators with their alleged unwillingness to fight against Israel’s ally America.

Undoubtedly frightened by the effervescence reigning among the Jews, Stalin—beginning at the end of 1948, and for the rest of his life—drastically changed his policies with regard to them. But in his own manner: acting drastically but without announcement, radically but by little steps, and in apparently secondary domains. (p. 430)

In January 1949, Pravda published a long article entitled “On an Antipatriotic Group of Theater Critics.” These theater critics, it was reported, hid their true identity behind pseudonyms. Thus, the critic Kholodov was really Meierovich; Yasny was Finkelstein; Svetov was Scheidman, and so forth. Shortly thereafter, Pravda launched a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.” At first, no one had any idea who the “rootless cosmopolitans” were. Eventually an official list of them was published, and every name was recognizably Jewish.

At the same time, the regime started making bizarre claims that Russians had been responsible for various advances in civilization. For example: Soviet textbooks began teaching that Russian scientists had invented the radio and the automobile. Those taken in by published accounts of “Solzhenitsyn’s Great-Russian chauvinism” may wish to note his curt dismissal of this “imbecilic and ludicrous glorification of Russian ‘superiority’ in all domains” (p. 434).

Between 1948 and 1953, Jews were kicked out of the higher circles of production, administration, cultural and ideological activities en masse; access to a whole series of higher education establishments was limited or simply refused them. Responsible posts in the KGB, the organs of the Party and of the Army were closed to them. (p. 437)

By the fall of 1952, Stalin was acting against the Jews openly. A show trial of an innocent group of Jewish doctors was inaugurated with great fanfare in January 1953. On February 9th, a bomb exploded outside the Soviet embassy in Tel-Aviv and the Soviet Union broke off relations with Israel.

Then, suddenly, it was all over. Stalin suffered a debilitating stroke at the end of February and died on March 6, 1953.

It has often been asserted that only Stalin’s death at this juncture saved the Jews from mass deportation to Siberia or the Far North the following summer. Solzhenitsyn reports:

In a recent study, the historian G. Kostyrchenko, a great specialist in Stalin’s Jewish policy, refutes this “deportation myth” with very solid arguments, showing that no fact either then or now has come to light confirming it; and that in any case, Stalin did not have the means to put such a deportation into operation. (p. 442)

We simply do not know what further developments there would have been in the anti-Semitic campaign had Stalin lived longer. Following his death, the Jewish doctors, whose trial had been filling the newspapers for weeks, were quietly released. The official anti-Semitic campaign lost steam.

Solzhenitsyn devotes the last five chapters, totaling one hundred twenty pages, to the twenty years which followed Stalin’s death. The principal circumstance of interest during this period is the gradual withering of Jewish support for the government.

At the end of the 1960s [says Solzhenitsyn] one observation which strengthened me in the conviction that the jig was up for the Communist regime was to what an extent the Jews had turned their backs on it. And without them, Bolshevik fanaticism—which was showing its age and ceasing even to be a fanaticism—was seized by a very Russian nonchalance and a peculiarly Brezhnevian inertia. (p. 475)

Solzhenitsyn notes the prominence of Jews among the dissident movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Four of the seven men who staged an unprecedented (for the USSR) protest on Red Square following the invasion of Czechoslovakia were Jewish. The Jew Semion Gluzman paid with his freedom for his campaign against the political use of psychiatric hospitals (pp. 483–84). Solzhenitsyn writes:

In this wasted country, still subject to repression, the Russian Social Fund to which I turned over all world rights to The Gulag Archipelago [after creating it himself!—FRD], began its aid to the persecuted, and Alexander Ginzburg, competent and devoted, was its first administrator. Among its benefactors have been many Jews and half-Jews (which has given occasion in certain Russian circles, blinded by their extremism, to stigmatize the fund as “Jewish”). (p. 513)

But Jewish abandonment of Communism was too frequently accompanied by the belief that the Communist regime was something uniquely and wholly Russian—in other words, that the Jewish people bore no responsibility for it. Solzhenitsyn cites a number of recent Jewish authors who have characterized the early Soviet regime as nothing more than another chapter in the long history of Jewish persecution. According to a certain Yu. Stern, “Soviet history is marked by a consistent will to break and exterminate the Jews.” V. Boguslavsky tells his readers that “the Soviet regime ruined the Jews, deported them, destroyed families”—all of which was “just a normal disaster for the majority of the Jewish population.” F. Kolker says that “among the numerous nationalities populating the Soviet Union, the Jews have always been considered apart, as the least ‘trustworthy’ element,” to which the author replies in amazement “what sort of amnesia must one have suffered to write such things in 1983?” (pp. 478–79). Even the dissident Jewish songwriter Alexander Galich sings:

Never, Jews, shall you be chamberlains . . .
Never shall you sit in Synod or Senate.
Your seat shall be the Solovetsky Islands,[2] the Butyrka Prison.

“They have forgotten,” marvels the author, “quite sincerely—they have entirely forgotten. How difficult it is to remember the evil one has done!” (p. 490).

These blind assertions of national innocence are matched by a host of vitriolic remarks about Russia: “a country of slaves, a troop of traitors, informants, and hangmen,” according to Arkadi Belinkov (p. 497). N. Shapiro tells us that “in the labyrinthine depths of the Russian soul there invariably hides a pogromist . . . a slave and a tramp as well” (p. 498). The country is “a human pigsty,” according to G. Kopylov (p. 495). “They were crawling on all fours and bowing down to trees and stones, while we gave them the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” said Yakov Yakir, safely arrived in Tel Aviv, of his former fellow-countrymen (p. 498). “[Russian] Orthodoxy is a religion of savages,” according to M. Grobman. According to N. Shulgin, the Jewish involvement in early Communism prevented it from becoming much worse than it actually was (p. 494). Solzhenitsyn comments:

Let us note that none of these malevolent judgments upon the “Russian soul” provokes protest. If someone does not like anything Russian, holds it in contempt, or even says “Russia is a garbage dump,” this is not immoral in Russia. Here, no one addresses Presidents, Prime Ministers, Senators, or Congressmen to ask anxiously “what do you think of this incitation to hate a group of human beings because of their nationality?” (pp. 498–99)

Solzhenitsyn also remarks upon the following confusion in the Jewish attitude toward nationhood:

I have noticed that Jews more often than others insist that no attention must be paid to nationality. “What does it matter, one’s nationality?” they repeat; “national ‘traits,’ national ‘character’—do these even exist?”

But, with my hand on my heart: it is precisely Jews who scrutinize and strain to discern national peculiarities more jealously, more attentively, more secretly than others: those of their own nation. (p. 502)

A new era was ushered in by the Six Day War, which

. . . shook the entire Jewish world as well as Soviet Jews with a violence of biblical proportions. Jewish national consciousness resurged and erupted like an avalanche. After the Six Day War, a lot of things changed. . . . An impulse to action had been given. Letters and petitions flooded into Soviet and international bodies. National life recommenced: on High Holy Days it became difficult to get into synagogues they were so crowded. Clandestine circles were formed to study Hebrew, Jewish history, and Jewish culture. (p. 476)

The ultimate effect of the Israeli victory upon Russian Jews was to inspire the emigration movement of the 1970s.

For many Jews, despite a material situation clearly more favorable than that of the great mass of the population, the feeling of being oppressed was quite real (p. 518). From the end of 1969, Jews by the dozens and by the hundreds began signing petitions addressed to “foreign public opinion.” They demanded that they be allowed to leave for Israel. (p. 523)

They met with widespread sympathy. “To this day,” marvels the author, “it is hard to believe how much publicity they enjoyed” (p. 531). The American Senate refused to ratify most favored nation trading status to the Soviet Union without adding the Jackson Amendment, requiring total freedom of Jewish emigration.

And there was no one to say out loud and clear: Gentlemen! Fifty-five years ago it was not tens of thousands but millions of our compatriots who could only dream of escaping from the hated Soviet regime. No one here was given the right to emigrate. And never once did the politicians, the public men of the West protest or propose to punish the Soviet Union even if only by commercial restrictions! Fifteen million peasants were exterminated during “dekulakization,” six million were driven to famine in 1932, not to speak of mass executions and the millions who ended up in camps. During this time you were glad to sign treaties with the Soviet leaders, grant them loans, shake their hands, seek their favor. And it was only when the Jews in particular had their rights infringed that the entire Western world was seized with a burning compassion and began to understand what this regime was made of. (p. 529)

Large scale Jewish emigration began in 1971, mostly not from the Russian center but from Georgia and the Baltic Republics: 13,000 the first year, 32,000 the second, and 35,000 the third. At first nearly all the Jews went to Israel. By March 1973, 700,000 requests to emigrate had been received.

The Yom Kippur War in the fall of 1973 damaged Israel’s prestige, following which emigration slowed to 20,000 in 1974. By 1975–76, nearly 50 percent of emigrants went to countries other than Israel, principally the United States. After 1977, between 70 and 98 percent went directly to the United States (pp. 532–33).

“Only the first wave was motivated by an ideal,” admits one Jewish author (pp. 534–35).

During the Gorbachev period, by about 1987, all restrictions upon Jewish emigration were lifted.

Henceforth, a radically new epoch in the history of the now free Russian Jews and of their relations with the new Russia has opened. This period has brought rapid and substantial changes, but it is still too short to anticipate the long-term results. . . . The development of this new theme would go beyond the span of life allotted this author. (pp. 567–68)

With these words, the work closes.

* * *

The themes of national repentance and mutual understanding resonate throughout Two Hundred Years Together. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that they presuppose an effort of historical understanding. This outlook, no doubt, is due to memories of the Communist regime under which he grew up. The Bolsheviks sought to make a clean sweep of the past, and systematically falsified history in the pursuit of a “classless” or conflict free society. Such a mindset can still be found in Russia; many reviewers warned that any study of the Russian-Jewish past would only lead to the revival of old hatreds.

In this context, the reader of Two Hundred Years Together may wish to ponder the following exchange from an interview Solzhenitsyn granted Moskovskiye Novosti (January 1–7, 2003) in connection with publication of the second volume:

Interviewer: The main premise of your wide-ranging work is this: the truth about the Russians’ relationship with the Jews is morally vital. To whom? To history? To both nationalities?”

Solzhenitsyn: Any truth is morally vital to a person. Any truth in principle.

Solzhenitsyn also has some words for the academic critics who have caviled at the sparseness of his archival research. The type of historical understanding our age requires, both in Russia and in America, is at heart an act of the imagination, in which specialized research plays an important but limited role.

Interviewer: You have addressed a subject wherein you yourself often invoke such concepts as “spirit,” “consciousness,” and “historical fate.” Were these nebulous notions not an impediment to your well-researched work, based on solid facts?

Solzhenitsyn: Far from being an impediment, they were, to a very large extent, a part of my underlying concept. My book aims to go deep into Jewish thoughts, feelings, ideas, and mentality—that is to say, the realm of the spiritual. In this sense the objective of my book is not, in fact, scientific, but artistic. It is basically an artistic work. Except that there are not two or three characters, but a great many characters, with various, most diverse feelings and ideas. Facts alone are not enough to understand them. . . . I went to them and felt an affinity with them, as one does with characters in a work of fiction. . . . Generally speaking, I regard the spirit and consciousness as the most substantial elements of history.

Notes

1. This is essentially the version accepted by Richard Pipes in Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage, 1995), 104-12. Pipes denies that the Volunteer Army perpetrated pogroms—something Solzhenitsyn appears to accept (cf. pp. 164, 167).

2. The location of the first Soviet labor camp for political prisoners, in the far north.

Source: The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, Winter 2008–2009

F. Roger Devlin, "Solzhenitsyn on the Jews and Tsarist Russia"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Deux siècles ensemble
Volume 1: Juifs et Russes avant la révolution
Paris: Fayard, 2002

It appears now that the English-speaking world will have to wait some time yet for a translation of Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two volume study of Russian-Jewish relations. Translations into both French and German have been available for five years, and Italian, Hungarian, Greek, Czech, and Latvian editions are in the works. But no publisher in America or Britain seems to want to bother with a book which has clearly generated an unusual degree of interest. Working from the French version, I will try to give readers of The Occidental Quarterly some idea what the book is and isn’t, of what it attempts to do and what it accomplishes.

A number of reviewers have criticized Solzhenitsyn’s over-reliance on just a few sources, some of them mere encyclopedias, and all in the Russian language. The late American historian John Klier went so far as to list nine historians besides himself whose work Solzhenitsyn might usefully have been consulted were he not largely limited to his native tongue: Hans Rogger, Michael Stanislawski, Michael Aronson, Steven Zipperstein, Jonathan Frankel, Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, Shaul Stampfer, Israel Bartal, and Eli Lederhendler. Klier concluded that “despite its good intentions, the book serves largely as a reminder that he received the Nobel Prize for literature, not for history.”1 Richard Pipes had similar criticisms, describing Two Hundred Years Together as “something more than a personal statement yet less than a work of scholarship.”2

Indeed, it must be acknowledged that the work is merely an overview for a general audience of a vast historical panorama, and not the minutely researched life’s work of a professional historian. Virtually all the information it contains has been available elsewhere to any reader of Russian determined to find it. It is thus inaccurate to speak, as some have done, of Solzhenitsyn’s “revealing” the role of Jews in the Revolution.

Two Hundred Years originated, in fact, as a kind of by-product of The Red Wheel, the author’s series of historical novels on late Imperial Russia and the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn’s wife Natalia Dmitrievna, in an interview for National Public Radio, explained:

He didn’t intend to write this book at all. He was writing The Red Wheel. But anyone who is studying the history of the Russian Revolution will inevitably get an enormous amount of material about the role of the Jews, because it was great. Aleksandr Isaevich realized that if he put this material into The Red Wheel he would create the impression that he was blaming the Jews for the Russian Revolution, which he does not.3

As I have written earlier (“Prophet of the Nation,” TOQ, 6:3), Russian nationalists have often triumphantly pointed to the Jewish role in the Revolution as a way of avoiding the more painful course of national self-examination. In publishing his consideration of the Jewish role later and separately from his main work, Solzhenitsyn sought to discourage his Russian readers from indulging in this sort of scapegoating. Similar considerations may be warranted in the West, where certain persons far removed from Solzhenitsyn’s Christian moral vision have suddenly become impatient to read this one particular work of his. The concern of Solzhenitsyn and his family that Two Hundred Years might be misunderstood by being taken outside the context of the rest of the author’s works may be one factor working against the speedy appearance of an English translation.

When an interviewer for the German weekly Der Spiegel asked him last year “are we to conclude that the Jews carry more responsibility than others for the failed Soviet experiment?” he responded:

I avoid exactly that which your question implies: I do not call for any sort of scorekeeping or comparisons between the moral responsibility of one people or another; moreover, I completely exclude the notion of responsibility of one nation towards another. All I am calling for is self-reflection. Every people must answer morally for all of its past—including that past which is shameful. Answer by what means? By attempting to comprehend: How could such a thing have been allowed? Where in all this is our error? And could it happen again? It is in that spirit, specifically, that it would behoove the Jewish people to answer, both for the revolutionary cutthroats and the ranks willing to serve them. Not to answer before other peoples, but to oneself, to one’s conscience, and before God. Just as we Russians must answer . . .4

Critics of Solzhenitsyn have even seized upon this unselfconscious use of the expression “we Russians.” John Klier, e.g., writes: “Solzhenitsyn envisages a dualistic struggle, fought between us (Russians) and them (Jews).”5 But all he is doing, really, is treating the bond of nationhood as natural and normal. It may be a clue to Solzhenitsyn’s thought that he never claims for himself an objective observation post outside and above the fray of history, as “tolerant” Western historians such as Klier implicitly do.

* * *

Bearing in mind Solzhenitsyn’s fundamental purposes and assumptions, let us see what he has to tell us of the Jews’ and Russians’ two hundred years together.

The ancestors of Russia’s Jews were the Ashkenazim, or German Jews, who began migrating eastward into Poland in the Eleventh Century AD. During the centuries of their Polish sojourn, the Jews developed an institution called the kahal (plural kehalim). Although the word originally signified “community,” it came to be applied to an exclusive administrative council which served as intermediary between the Jewish world and the public authorities.

In Poland, the kehalim collected the Crown’s taxes (receiving the Crown’s patronage in return); collected funds for the social needs of the Jews; established the rules which governed commerce and industry; exercised judicial authority over the Jewish population; and paid the salaries of Rabbis. The kehalim were jealous of their authority, which they frequently abused for personal ends. Accordingly, they were unpopular with ordinary Jews and relied mainly on the support of the Polish Crown to maintain their position. Both the rabbinate and the kehalim worked to keep ordinary Jews isolated from the surrounding society, in part by minutely regulating their activity and keeping their minds focused on ritual obligations.

After quoting Jewish writers on the subject, Solzhenitsyn adds:

The two thousand year endurance of the Jewish people in the Diaspora calls for admiration and respect. Yet, looking more closely, at certain times such as the Russo-Polish period from the sixteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, this solidarity came about through the authoritarian methods of the kehalim, and one is uncertain whether respect must be shown for these methods simply because they come from a religious tradition. However that may be, even a small measure of this type of separatism on the part of Russians gets imputed to us as a grave fault. (p. 40)

At the time of their incorporation into the Russian Empire, the Jew’s economic condition in Poland was undergoing a long period of decline. Much of the kahal’s energy was devoted to combating the rise of both the new Hassidic movement and the German-Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah).

Before the partitions of Poland, Jews were officially prohibited from settling in Russia, although a small number of Jewish merchants were in fact already trading in Ukraine and the Baltic ports. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes throughout his history that the apparent harshness of Russian law must usually be understood within a context of extremely lax enforcement. But the first partition, in 1772, rendered any prohibition a dead letter by suddenly bringing some one hundred thousand Polish Jews into the Russian Empire.

Catherine the Great was personally well-disposed toward the Jews, but Russian doubts about the sincerity of her own conversion from Protestantism made her cautious about displaying liberality toward her non-Orthodox subjects.

The imposition of Russian law threatened the traditional authority of the kahal, e.g., by allowing Jews to pay their taxes directly to the government. In 1785, however, a kahal delegation successfully petitioned the Crown for a restoration of most of its old prerogatives, tax collecting included. The Russian government apparently saw the kahal as a useful tool of administration and did not dissolve it until 1844.

In 1786, public offices were opened to Jews: there came to be Jewish city-councilmen, mayors, and judges. Catherine eventually sent an order to the Governor General of White Russia (Belarus), signed in her own hand, demanding that “equality of rights for Jews be introduced on the spot without the smallest delay,” on pain of penal sanctions against those who infringed upon them. Solzhenitsyn comments:

Let us note that by this act the Jews obtained equal civil rights contrary not only to the situation in Poland, but even before they obtained them in France or Germany. Moreover, the Jews in Russia received straightway the individual freedom which would be denied the Russian peasants for another eighty years. (p. 43)

In 1790, Catherine received a petition from the merchant’s guild of Moscow alleging fraudulent business practices on the part of newly arrived Jewish merchants from White Russia and abroad, and requesting their formal expulsion. In December 1791, the Tsarina granted this petition, forbidding Jewish traders from permanent settlement in the central provinces of Russia. At the same time, by way of mitigation, she accorded Jews unlimited rights of residence and trade in “New Russia,” a large, thinly populated territory recently won from the Turks (today constituting Moldova and a large part of Ukraine). Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that this decree was not intended to favor Christians in general at the expense of Jews. There was a reciprocal prohibition, e.g., against Christian merchants from Central Russia settling in “New Russia.”

But this decision, made on practical grounds and without any long views, became the basis for the Pale of Settlement, the area in Western Russia set aside for unrestricted Jewish residence. Over time, more and more exceptions would be made, allowing Jewish students, professionals, and certain types of businessmen to settle in central Russia. But until its abolition by the Provisional Government in 1917, the vast majority of Russia’s Jews would continue to live within the Pale (e.g., 94 percent in 1897, according to the Imperial Census).

The second and third partitions of Poland took place in 1793 and 1795, and were much more consequential for our story than the first: nearly one million Jews were now incorporated into Russia. Their numbers would increase fivefold over the next century.

In 1800, a serious famine occurred in White Russia, an area of heavy Jewish settlement. Gavril Derzhavin, an Imperial Senator (and, incidentally, the greatest Russian poet before Pushkin), was sent to take emergency measures and submit a report. He found that Polish landowners commonly ignored their estates, preferring to hire the services of Jewish overseers for terms of just one to three years. These overseers had every incentive to squeeze profit out of the estates during their brief tenure, even at the expense of future productivity. They provided the peasants seed and tools for farming at three times the market rate and bought the resulting produce at below market prices, both extortions made possible by a monopoly granted and enforced by the Polish gentry. Many Jews also worked as distillers or tavern keepers on the estates or in rural villages. The drunkenness of the peasants and the rapacity of the Jewish distillers combined to divert grain to vodka production which otherwise would have gone to make bread.

The fundamental problem, as Derzhavin saw it, was that the Jews had outgrown their traditional economic niche. There were too many tradesmen and not enough primary producers in heavily Jewish areas. The Senator also lamented that “[the Jews] have only contempt for those who do not share their faith.” He recommended that they be encouraged to colonize less densely populated areas and that the Government sponsor schools to instruct them in Russian and useful trades. And, in what Solzhenitsyn calls “the rather harsh frankness of his time,” Derzhavin declared that “if Divine Providence has kept this nation of dangerous mores on the earth and not exterminated them, it is proper for governments under whose scepter He has placed them to put up with them as well.”

Such observations have made Derzhavin unpopular with Jewish historians. But Solzhenitsyn rejects the accusation that he was a “fanatical Judeophobe,” pointing out that he did not blame the Jews for the famine (as some Jewish sources assert). This is a recurring pattern in Two Hundred Years Together—Solzhenitsyn seems less concerned to recount the Jewish share in the tragic fate of Russia than to vindicate the honor of Russians (especially Tsarist officials) who have wrongly gone down in the history books as persecutors.

The government’s eventual response to Derzhavin’s proposals was the “Jewish Regulation of 1804.” Freedom of conscience was guaranteed to all Jews, including the Hassidim (previously persecuted by the kehalim). Jews were accorded equal protection of the law, including the right to own land and employ Christian workers. The project of government sponsored Jewish schools was dropped at the insistence of the kehalim, but Russian schools and universities were opened to them on a basis of equality.

The most important measure, however, was a total prohibition upon Jewish distilling and tavern keeping. Jews were even ordered to leave the White Russian countryside within a period of three years. As usual, the Tsarist government’s powers of enforcement were quite unequal to its ambitions; similar orders continued to be issued with limited effect every few years until 1881.

The government tried to mitigate the new prohibitions with subsidies to set up the affected Jews in new professions, and temporary tax exemptions to let them become established. The Regulation claimed to be, and was in certain ways, the most liberal Jewish policy in Europe. But the Jews felt cruelly the necessity of abandoning a mode of life they had been habituated to for generations under the Polish Crown.

The government devoted strenuous and repeated efforts to encourage Jews to take up agriculture in the virgin lands of New Russia. The result was an epic fiasco of more than fifty years duration. Many of the Jewish colonists “had no idea they would have to perform agricultural labor personally; they apparently thought others would see to the actual cultivation of the ground.”

They sowed a negligible part of their allotted fields, sowed too late by waiting for the weather to warm up, sowed five seasons in a row on a field plowed only once; used the wrong seed or lost their seed, did not rotate their crops, broke their farming tools through inexperience, or simply sold them, slaughtered livestock for meat and then complained of not having any, heated their houses with straw meant for feeding the cattle, etc., etc. . . . (Condensed from pp. 83, 85–86)

Animals, tools and seeds were given to them several times over; new loans were constantly extended to them to assure their subsistence. Many simply ran away, setting up as tavern keepers again in nearby towns. There were just enough successful families to excite furious envy in all the rest, who feared the authorities would force everyone to work once a single family had shown it possible for Jews to farm.

During the reign of Alexander II (1855–1881) the government gradually acknowledged failure and abandoned the project. “But what are we to say after the experience of the colonization of Palestine,” asks Solzhenitsyn, “where the Jews perfectly mastered the art of working the land under conditions much less favorable than in New Russia?” (p. 173).

Jews took with far greater success to Russian language education and new forms of commerce. Jews were acknowledged to be better merchants than Russians; once, when the Russian merchants of Kiev managed to get their Jewish competition expelled, the cost of living in the city noticeably rose. Industries such as logging, tobacco, sugar, railroad construction, and the grain and lumber trades were developed by Jews.

A new class of Jewish professionals arose in the capitals (university graduates being permitted to settle outside the Pale). Some Jews even gained titles of nobility. The era of Alexander II, the liberator of the serfs, was “without doubt the best period of Russian history for the Jews,” according to one of Solzhenitsyn’s Jewish sources.

These years also introduce the most controversial and difficult theme in Solzhenitsyn’s work. For it was during this time of optimism and confidence, strangely, that the revolutionary movement first took form. It was certainly not Jewish in origin: no leader of the early days was Jewish. “Until the beginning of the 1870s,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “only a very small number of Jews belonged to the revolutionary movement, and in secondary roles” (p. 236). He gives the names of some of these early Jewish revolutionaries, and biographical details for a few.

But more significant is his evocation of the atmosphere of those days, when enthusiasm for revolution was first ignited among Jewish university students. He quotes from the memoirs of Leo Deutsch, who was one of the pioneers: “Even the most fanatical yeshiva student, immersed in the study of the Talmud,” could not withstand “two or three minutes’ discussion with a nihilist [i.e., radical]. . . . Even a pious Jew who had only brushed up against ‘goy’ culture, only made a break with his own traditional world view, was already capable of going very far, even to extremes.”

These young men would have been astounded by the claims made in later days that the revolutionary movement they were joining was a “Jewish thing.” They were enfants perdus who felt nothing but contempt for their benighted ancestors. Their heroes were all “advanced” Russian thinkers such as Dobrolyubov, Chernishevsky, and Pisarev. (Solzhenitsyn notes, however, that Jewish families rarely disowned their radical offspring—something that often happened with ethnically Russian revolutionaries.)

Jewish revolutionaries thought of themselves as working toward the happiness of mankind—or, at the very least, all the peoples of the Russian Empire. Leo Deutsch recalls that “none of the Jewish revolutionaries of the 70s could imagine the idea that one should act only for one’s own nation. For us, the Jew had to assimilate completely into the native stock.” One symptom of their lack of national aims was that they showed virtually no interest in abolishing the Pale of Settlement. How important could a detail like that appear to young men preparing to usher in a radiant future for the world? On this point Solzhenitsyn is emphatic: “Anti-Russian motivations cannot be imputed to these first Jewish revolutionaries, as certain persons in Russia claim today—not at all!” (p. 241).

According to Deutsch, just ten or twelve Jews were involved in the early phase of revolutionary terror. And Solzhenitsyn points out that terrorist groups often favored Russian members for carrying out their attacks: no Jews were directly involved in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for example. Nevertheless, the unforeseen effect of that assassination was a series of anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. Apparently, Jewish involvement in the revolutionary movement was notorious enough by 1881 to be taken for granted by many ordinary Russians. How extensive was it, though, and how accurate the common perception? It is difficult to measure trends like this, but Solzhenitsyn does find some relevant numbers: in the first six months of 1879, 4 percent of the 379 persons charged with crimes against the state were Jews; for the entire year 1880, 6.5 percent of the 1054 persons tried before the Imperial Senate were Jews (p. 263). This would seem to indicate that, on the eve of the pogroms, Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement was already beginning to surpass their share in the general population (around 4 percent).

The word “pogrom” (literally “devastation”) had been used before this time for anti-Jewish riots in Odessa in 1821, 1859, and 1871. These, however, had been isolated occurrences involving mainly the local Greek community, who were commercial rivals of the Jews. But the pogroms the world remembers began on the 15th of April 1881 in the town of Yelisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad), Ukraine. Once begun, peasants from the surrounding villages began arriving to take part. Local troops remained passive at first, not knowing what to do. A cavalry regiment in the vicinity eventually arrived to put a stop to the violence by the 17th. Some sources say there were no fatalities in this first incident; others say there was just one.

For several weeks following, pogroms broke out unpredictably in dozens of towns, including the major cities of Odessa and Kiev. “It was like the unleashing of an elemental force,” writes one of Solzhenitsyn’s Jewish sources; “the local populace who, for various reasons, wanted to mix it up with the Jews posted proclamations and appeals to recruit forces.” Common criminals and thieves followed in their wake. Jewish taverns were a favorite target, but shops and houses were also attacked. The assassination of the Tsar was more occasion than cause of this violence. Those close to the events emphasized economic grievances as the true motivation: Russians felt taken advantage of by Jews. Rioters are said to have believed themselves acting justly and “carrying out the Tsar’s will.” When police arrived at their houses later to recover stolen property, they protested “it’s our own blood you are taking!”

Many radicals were not at all displeased by the pogroms, which they hoped to steer in the direction of a general uprising against autocracy. One tract of August, 1881 even painted the Jews as the local “bourgeoisie,” and advocated “revolutionary” attacks upon them.

According to a Jewish contemporary of these events, “they pillaged the Jews, beat them, but did not kill them.” Other sources speak of six or seven victims. In the period 1880–1890, no one mentions multiple murders or rapes.

Nikolai Ignatiev, installed as Minister of the Interior in May 1881, decided on a policy of firm repression, although it was made difficult by the unforeseeable character of the outbreaks and his limited forces. Nevertheless, he ordered his men to fire upon rioters. In the towns of Borisov and Nezhin this resulted in fatalities. In Kiev, 1400 arrests were made. Many in the government felt this was still inadequate. The police chief of Kiev wrote apologetically to the Tsar that the local military tribunals had been too lenient with the rioters; Alexander III wrote in the margin: “This is inexcusable!”

Solzhenitsyn’s account, based on documents close to the events, differs dramatically from the common version whereby the pogroms were instigated by the government itself. The American Rabbi Max Raisin, e.g., in his widely reprinted History of the Jews in Modern Times, writes of “. . . the ravaging of women and the killing or maiming of thousands of men, women, and children”; and adds: “As was subsequently shown, these disturbances were inspired and premeditated by the government, which abetted the rioters in their work and hindered the Jews from defending themselves.”

In the autumn of 1881, at Ignatiev’s recommendation, a committee was created to draft new Jewish legislation in response to the pogroms. Unlike previous “Jewish committees”—there had been eight of them already—it operated on the assumption that assimilation was an unattainable goal. (This is what many Jews were starting to think as well.) The committee recommended looking to the past for guidance, apparently meaning the customs of pre-emancipation Europe. The new sentiment was that, “Jews had always been considered a foreign element, and must once and for all be considered such.”

Ignatiev himself recommended strong measures to prevent further trouble, including the expulsion of Jews from rural villages “so the inhabitants of the countryside may know the government is protecting them from exploitation by the Jews,” and also because “governmental power is unable to defend [the Jews] against pogroms which might occur in scattered villages.” The Imperial Senate found this proposal overly coercive and refused to ratify it. Instead, on the 3rd of May 1882 a set of “provisional regulations” was issued which merely forbade new Jewish settlement in the countryside. A list of villages exempt from the ban was appended, and it grew over time.

Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn finds an historian asserting that the authorities “threw nearly a million Jews out on the street and out of the villages in order to confine them in the cities of the Pale of Settlement.”

Jewish emigration, especially to America, began to increase in the years following the pogroms, and it is widely asserted that this occurred because of the pogroms. The emigrants, however, came mostly from Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland—not from Ukraine, where the violence had actually occurred. In fact, there was even a Jewish internal migration toward the more thinly populated Ukraine in these same years. And Jewish emigration to America only became a mass phenomenon in the late 1890s: Solzhenitsyn suggests that the State monopoly on distilling instituted in 1896 was a principal cause. In any case, the evidence indicates that Jews came to America as economic migrants, not as refugees “fleeing the Tsarist pogroms.”

There was, however, a general tendency toward greater restrictions on Jews in the years following the pogroms. The introduction of a numerus clausus system in schools was among the most important. It be- gan in individual institutions as early as 1882, and became govern- ment policy in 1887. The general rule was to allow a maximum of 10 percent Jewish enrollment within the Pale of Settlement, 5 percent outside, and 3 percent in the two capitals. (Jews were around 4 percent of the population of the Empire.) A few institutions closed themselves entirely to Jewish students. Alexander III’s closest adviser candidly explained to the visiting Moritz von Hirsch that the Jews “rich with their multi-millennial culture, were a spiritually and intellectually more powerful element than the ignorant and coarse Russians,” who therefore required a bit of handicapping.

Solzhenitsyn then lists the various exceptions and mitigations to the system for Jews: (1) schools for girls and women were not affected, (2) neither were private schools, and new ones began springing up in response to the regulations, (3) schools of commerce were excepted, (4) schools in places without enough Jews to fill the numerus clausus could accept Jewish students from elsewhere, (5) Jews shut out of professional schools could study at home and still sit for professional qualifying exams. If all else failed, they could simply go abroad: Yiddish speakers acquire German easily, and many “Russian” students in German institutions over the next few decades were Jewish. “In sum,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “the admission quotas did not at all slow the Jewish aspiration to education” (p. 307). Indeed, by the time he finished, I found myself wondering whether complacent white students in the USA might not benefit from some analogous sort of goading.

In these same years there was also a crackdown on Jewish avoidance of military service. This had reached the scandalous rate of 31.6 percent for the period 1876–1883, while the figure for the rest of the population was 0.19 percent. The crackdown may also have contributed to the rise in Jewish emigration. The authorities were unable, however, to get the Jewish rate below 10 percent for long.

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of modern racial anti-Semitism in Western Europe. This found an echo in occasional anti-Jewish remarks in the Russian press as early as the 1870s, but “without the strongly theoretical coloration they had in Germany.” In the course of the war with Turkey in the Balkans (1878– 1879), the panslavist newspaper Novoe Vremia reported on acts of plunder committed by Jewish supply masters. Gradually the paper shifted to a frank anti-Semitic line, calling for firm measures against Jewish “control” of Russian science, literature, and art.

The Jews, mindful of the recent pogroms, felt these developments added insult to injury and entirely abandoned the idea of assimilation. Calls for an independent Jewish state were even heard in Russia as early as 1882, fourteen years before Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat was published. The rise of Zionism might have been expected to encroach upon Jewish involvement in the revolutionary movement. Individual cases of such “conversion” are certainly known, but the overall trend of these years was toward ever greater Jewish participation in revolutionary politics. All imaginable combinations of socialism and Zionism also found their advocates.

Marxism seemed unpromising as a Jewish revolutionary ideology. Traditionally, Jews put a high priority on the chance to become their own masters, and would only take up trades which held out this prospect. Accepting work in a factory was considered humiliating and dishonorable, almost like an admission of personal failure. Accordingly, there scarcely existed a Jewish “proletariat.”

Anyone familiar with the workings of the ideological mind will not be surprised that a way was found around this difficulty. Marx’s failure to offer a precise definition of “class” was helpful. Jewish theorists cobbled together a makeshift “revolutionary vanguard” out of artisans (e.g., dentists, tailors, nurses, pharmacists), shop-keepers, apprentices, low-level state employees, and even commercial middlemen—anyone who did not employ wage-workers.

The General Jewish Workers Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, commonly known as the Bund, was the most important Jewish socialist organization in Russia during the last twenty years of Tsarist rule. It was organized as early as 1895 according to Solzhenitsyn, although its first official conference was held in Vilnius only in 1897.

The Bund’s leading spirit was Julius Tsederbaum, known to history as Martov and reputed to be the nearest thing Lenin ever had to a personal friend. “Martov’s idea,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “was that henceforward priority needed to be given to propagating socialism among the masses rather than within small circles, and to this end they needed to make their materials more ‘Jewish,’ notably by translating them into Yiddish” (p. 269). Up to the very eve of the events of 1905, the Bund was the most powerful Social Democratic organization in Russia.

Officially, the Bund held that there was no single Jewish people, but merely a Jewish bourgeoisie (“the most wretched, most base in the world”) and a Jewish proletariat (“the vanguard of the workers’ army in Russia”). Yet this socialist party became a unifying factor in Jewish life, and as it grew it increasingly emphasized nationality. Solzhenitsyn notes with approval a Bund member’s assertion that “national does not mean nationalist.”

The year following the Vilnius conference, the Russian Social Democratic Party opened its own first conference in Minsk. Of the eight delegates, five were Jewish and three were members of the Bund. Although their origins were closely entwined—Lenin was at one point considered for the editorship of the Bund’s party organ!—relations between Bundists and Russian Social Democrats were never easy. The Bund consented to enter the Russian Social Democratic Party, but only as a whole, preserving full autonomy in regard to Jewish affairs. In 1902, it escalated its demands, preferring a mere federation with the Social Democrats which could allow differences in policy. The leadership even began arguing that “the Jewish proletariat is a part of the Jewish people which occupies a place set apart among the nations.”

At this, Lenin saw red. He argued that the Jews were not a nation at all, since they had neither a common language nor a common territory, a view Solzhenitsyn characterized as:

. . . an unimaginatively materialistic judgment: the Jews are one of the most authentic, most tightly-bound nations on earth—bound in spirit. With his superficial and vulgar internationalism, Lenin understood nothing of the depth and historical rootedness of the Jewish question. (p. 275)

When the Social Democratic Party split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, most Bundists sided with the Martov and the Mensheviks.

There was a long lull in anti-Jewish violence in Russia after the pogroms of the 1880s. But the events in Kishinev on 6–7 April 1903 surpassed in fury all which had gone before. Capital of the province of Bessarabia (now Moldova), Kishinev was a town of 50,000 Jews, 50,000 Romanians, 8,000 Russians (mostly Ukrainians), and several thousand of various other nationalities. Solzhenitsyn bases his account primarily upon the speeches for the prosecution in the ensuing trial, which were in turn based on the results of the official investigation. There were forty-two fatalities in this pogrom, thirty-eight of them Jewish. 1,350 houses were sacked, amounting to nearly one third of the houses in the city. Solzhenitsyn considers that the police were both disorganized to the point of incompetence and culpably negligent. It was the soldiers of a nearby garrison who finally quelled the rioting.

Solzhenitsyn finds no evidence that the pogrom was fomented “from above,” a view which still has its advocates.6 He traces such speculation to the desire of those times “to exploit the suffering as a means to striking a blow against Tsarist power,” and laments that the pogrom has been used “to blacken Russia and mark it forever with a seal of infamy” (p. 361). It certainly was: hysterical exaggerations, including grisly stories of rape and torture, were widely reported in the international press and almost everywhere laid at the doorstep of the Imperial government. A forged letter supposedly written by Interior Minister Plehve made the rounds to give apparent substance to the charge. The Hearst papers called upon the God of Justice to wipe Russia off the face of the earth.

In the months following the Kishinev pogrom, Jews throughout the Pale armed themselves and formed self-defense organizations. In Gomel (White Russia), a town about evenly divided between Christians and Jews, the young were trained in the use of revolvers. Many went out of their way to provoke Christians and express contempt for them in the weeks following the events in Kishinev.

On the 29th of August a fight broke out in a marketplace, and a group of Jews began beating a Christian. When some nearby peasants attempted to come to the man’s aid, the Jews whistled, an agreed-upon signal to summon other Jews in the area. According to government prosecutors at the subsequent trial, what followed amounted to an anti-Russian pogrom carried out by the Jews of Gomel: only Russians were killed during this day. Attacks continued through the afternoon and, as in Kishinev, were only put down when soldiers were called in. Three days later, violence broke out again among the Russian workers at a factory, but troops were on hand. The way into town was blocked, but some 250 Jewish houses in the suburbs were sacked. The Jews behaved violently on this day as well. Five Christians and four Jews were killed. Solzhenitsyn asserts that “no description of these events is found in the work of any Jewish author.”

The Jewish movement for equal rights continued during these years, although this was now joined by a demand for Jewish national autonomy which was blandly assumed to be a compatible aim. An eminent Russian-Jewish jurist remarked: “it must be admitted that those who made these demands had no clear idea of their content.” Solzhenitsyn points to an ambiguity many readers will be familiar with from other contexts:

The Jewish intelligentsia did not at all renounce its national identity. [Things had changed greatly since the 1870s!] Even the most extreme socialists tried as best they could to reconcile their ideology with the national sentiment. At the same time, however, no voice arose among the Jews to say that the Russian intelligentsia, which wholeheartedly supported its persecuted brothers, did not have to renounce its own national sentiment. Equity would have demanded this. But no one perceived the disparity at that time: by the notion of equal rights, the Jews understood something more. (p. 523)

In 1904 Russia, in the midst of a new wave of political assassinations and social unrest, ill-advisedly entered into war with Japan. The government suffered from its reputation as a persecutor when it was denied credit by Jewish bankers in the West. Between twenty and thirty thousand Jews fought in this war, and their courage was recognized by all. Many Jewish public figures, however, adopted a defeatist position, as did the entire intelligentsia. The war ended, of course, in a humiliating defeat for Russia.

What we call the Revolution of 1905 was not a single event, but a

series of strikes, uprisings, and mutinies which occurred against the background of military defeat and was egged on by the press and the socialist parties. Jews were especially prominent in the wave of strikes which began in the winter of 1904–1905. One Jewish writer later lamented that “nearly everywhere the strikes were observed only by Jewish workers. . . . In a whole series of towns, Russian workers opposed a stiff resistance to attempts to shut down the factories.” There are even cases recorded of Russian factory hands making short work of Jews who attempted political agitation among them.

The Jewish self-defense organizations of the Pale continued to grow after the events in Gomel. In 1905 they acted as a kind of amateur revolutionary army, working closely with the radical parties. Many cities were in a kind of continual revolutionary ferment that year, with policemen assassinated, universities taken over by radicals, and communications shut down. Young Jews took the lead in the disorder, and were especially forward in defacing Imperial flags and images of the Tsar. The Imperial Manifest of October 17th, granting numerous liberties and an elective parliament, met with nothing but scorn from the radical mobs, who viewed it as a mere symptom of weakness.

In the days which followed the Manifest, widespread but disorgan- ized reprisals were directed against Jews. Beatings and destruction of Jewish merchandise were accompanied by shouts such as: “There’s your liberation! There’s your Revolution! And that’s for the portrait of the Tsar!” The violence in Kiev is known as the “Kiev Pogrom of 1905,” although only twelve of the forty-seven victims were Jewish. In Odessa some five hundred people died in the riots following the Imperial Manifest, the largest figure for any pre-Revolutionary pogrom. Most of the young revolutionaries escaped the violence while the price for their actions was paid by innocent Jewish shopkeepers. Twenty-four pogroms are also said to have occurred outside the Pale of Settlement, directed not against Jews but any “progressive” elements that could be found.

In November 1905, the Union of the Russian People was formed to combat “the destructive anti-governmental action of the Jewish masses, united in their hatred for everything Russian and indifferent to the means they use.” It never amounted to much, but does seem to have had a real existence for a few years. This is more than can be said for the “Black Hundreds,” that fearful-sounding epitome of all that is reactionary. No one seems to know exactly who or what the Black Hundreds were. During the period following the revolution of 1905, the term became a kind of brickbat to use against anyone considered insufficiently “progressive,” rather like the expression “white supremacist” today.

During the winter of 1905–1906, press censorship was abolished, rights of association and assembly guaranteed, and elections held for a Duma, or National Legislature. In April the government promulgated a new Fundamental Law (the word “Constitution” was carefully avoided). The Jewish Bund, like the Bolsheviks, boycotted the election. There were twelve Jews among the 439 deputies elected to the first Duma, all denounced as traitors by Jewish socialists. Most Jews who accepted the “bourgeois” institution of a Duma joined the Constitutional Democratic Party, commonly known after their Russian acronym as the Kadets. Jewish equality was the first plank of the party’s program. Their leader, the Russian Pavel Milyukov, was the object of comically exaggerated admiration and praise by the Jewish men and (especially) women of the party. The first Duma was found both incompetent and intractable, and was dissolved by order of the Tsar after ten weeks. Anyone who reads contemporary descriptions of the deputies and their behavior (“drunken savages”) will understand that this was an entirely practical decision and not a high-handed act of despotism. Russia was quite unprepared for universal suffrage.

Widespread public disorder continued throughout 1906–1907. The revolution may yet have succeeded had it not been for the Tsar’s inspired appointment of Peter Stolypin, first as Minister of the Interior (April 1906), then—following the dissolution of the First Duma—as Prime Minister (July 1906). Stolypin is Solzhenitsyn’s model of prudent statesmanship and the subject of a long, appreciative section of August 1914. He put down the revolution with strong measures, including an eight month period of summary justice.

Stolypin drew up a plan for lifting many restrictions upon the Jews in December 1906. The Tsar did not ratify it, but gave permission to have it presented to the Second Duma, which met in February 1907. There were only four Jews this time, but many new leftwing deputies, all of whom proclaimed their devotion to the cause of Jewish equality. Regarding Stolypin’s generous Jewish proposal, however, they did nothing.

Solzhenitsyn explains this strange inaction as part of the political theater of the left:

The goal being to combat Autocracy, their interest lay in forever increasing pressure on the Jewish question, but never solving it: thus one kept one’s ammunition in reserve. These knights of liberty reasoned: let’s not allow the lifting of restrictions on the Jews dampen their ardor for battle. (p. 465)

Stolypin later carried out most of his plan through administrative decrees, as the Fundamental Law allowed him to do between Duma sessions. He was quickly attacked in Novoe Vremia as a pawn of the Jews, while the “progressive” press remained hostile to him.

Disproportionate Jewish influence in the press was as much an issue in late Tsarist Russia as it is in modern America, and one more freely discussed. The author reproduces the following anecdote:

Journalists set up their own press bureau which determined access to Duma sessions. Its members refused to accredit the correspondent from Kolokol (“The Bell”), the preferred newspaper of rural priests. [Russian journalist Adriana] Tyrkova intervened, observing that “one must not deprive these readers of the chance to be informed about Duma debates by a newspaper they trusted more than those of the opposition.” But [said Tyrkova] “my colleagues, who were mostly Jews, took offense and began shouting angrily that no one reads Kolokol, that the newspaper was good for nothing.” (p. 468)

A Duma deputy once pointed to the press gallery in the midst of a speech, calling it “this Pale of Jewish Settlement!” It became a standing joke.

The Second Duma was dissolved in June 1907 for similar reasons as the first. Many in the government would have been happy to rescind the Imperial Manifest altogether, but Stolypin insisted on drawing “society” (i.e., the intelligentsia) into some sort of partnership with the government. This would, if successful, have conferred greater legitimacy on the government and taught greater realism and responsibility to the intellectuals. So he restricted the franchise significantly, let a Third Duma be elected, and allowed it to finish out its legally foreseen five-year term. There were just two Jewish members.

The keystone of Stolypin’s policy was an agrarian reform which would have broken up rural communes in favor of family farms. This might have dealt a deathblow to socialism by eliminating its political base in peasant envy. In foreign policy, Stolypin favored cultivating good relations with Germany: a Stolypin government would never have blundered into war with her in 1914 simply to please the governments of France and Britain. The Russian Revolution of 1917 would have been unthinkable.

But after five years in office, on the 14th of September 1911, Solypin was assassinated in Kiev. The assassin, Dmitri Bogrov, was Jewish.

The reader will find a detailed reconstruction of this consequential assassination in August 1914. Solzhenitsyn, in common with certain contemporaries of the event, has been called “anti-Semitic” for not disguising Bogrov’s Jewishness, an accusation he treats with all the respect it deserves.

Everyone present at the event agrees that Bogrov might as easily have shot the Tsar as Stolypin. The twenty-three year old assassin seems to have comprehended something of Stolypin’s importance. But his precise motives are not understood. Solzhenitsyn the novelist ascribes to Bogrov in August 1914 some concern about Stolypin’s Jewish policy, but this is speculation. In any event, there were no pogroms against the Jews for the death of a mere Prime Minister.

The most dramatic event in Russian-Jewish history between this assassination and 1917 was the mass expulsion of Jews from the area of the front lines, ordered by General Yanushkevich during the German offensive of 1915. Thousands of Jews fled into the Russian interior, effectively marking the end of the Pale of Settlement. Thanks to this decision, when their long-awaited hour of “liberation” struck in February 1917, an unprecedented number of Jews were living in the capitals and larger cities of European Russia, in a position to take part in the formative struggles of the new regime.

Notes

1. John Klier, “No Prize for History,” History Today, November 2002, 60–61.

2. Richard Pipes, “Solzhenitsyn and the Jews, Revisited,” The New Republic 25 (November 2002).

3. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1128597.

4. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,496003,00.html.

5. Klier, “No Prize for History,” 60.

6. E.g., Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, “Pogrome in Rußland” (in English), http://www.sog.uni-hd.de/lehrstuhl/POGROME.html.

The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 3, Fall 2008