CORRECTED &
UPDATED Wikipedia writes Solzhenitsyn out from the History of Communism
Newsletter published on February 15, 2019
(1) Wikipedia writes
Solzhenitsyn out from the History of Communism
(2) Wikipedia webpage
on 200YT is obsessed with accusations of Antisemitism, fails to ask why no
English edition
(3) Solzhenitsyn
family dismisses 'Jewish conspiracy', says no English edition of 200YT; online
editions are illegal
(1) Wikipedia writes
Solzhenitsyn out from the History of Communism
- by Peter Myers, February 15, 2019
During the Cold War, any discussion of Communism brought up
Solzhenitsyn. He was the person who made the Gulag known to the world; he
exposed the reality of Communism from first-hand experience. Millions of readers
trusted his account of Communism more than any other.
Even Khrushchev honoured him, during the Thaw. He received
the highest awards, and was treated as a prophet and mentor. But, since the
publication of his book Two Hundred Years Together, he has become persona non
grata.
This book, his last and major work, his testament to
humanity, is his 2-volume history of the revolutionary period, covering the 200
years up to the fall of the Soviet Union. But it focuses on the relations
between Jews and Russians, and the Jewish role in the Red Terror.
For that reason, no official English edition has yet been
produced. although an unofficial translation is available at http://www.renegadetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Solzhenitsyn-200-Years-Together-Encrypted.pdf
How can we discuss such matters? The media that we use -
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, eBay and Paypal - are all Jewish-owned.
On many topics, Wikipedia is reliable, but not on matters
sensitive to Jews. Whether this is a matter of editiorial policy, or of Hasbara
by Jewish activists, I cannot say.
Today, Friday February 15, 2019, I searched various Wikipedia
webpages for 'Solzhenitsyn'. There were no hits on webpages 'Communism',
'Bolsheviks', 'Russian Revolution' and 'Red Terror'. Only the webpage 'Gulag'
had hits (15).
'Soviet Union' ('USSR' redirected there) webpage had one
mention of Solzhenitsyn, not in the body of the article, or the References or
the Bibliography, but in "Further reading", where it lists one book - which does
not deal with the Soviet period, but post-Soviet reconstruction.
In short, Solzhenitsyn has been censored. Written out, wiped
out.
No wonder, then, that there's still no official English
translation of 200YT, after 20 years.
Communism: no hits:
This page was last edited on 14 February 2019, at 14:21
(UTC).
Russian Revolution ('Bolshevik Revolution' redirected there)
: no hits
This page was last edited on 6 February 2019, at 11:57
(UTC).
Bolsheviks: no hits
This page was last edited on 13 February 2019, at 01:14
(UTC).
Red Terror: 0 hits
Last edited on 8
January 2019, at 20:30
Soviet Union (& USSR, which redirects there):
One mention, not in the body of the article, or the
References or the Bibliography, but in "Further reading", where it lists this
book - which does not deal with the Soviet period:
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and
Tentative Proposals, trans. and
annotated by Alexis Klimoff. First ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. N.B.:
Also discusses the other national
constituents of the USSR. ISBN 0-374-17342-7
This page was last edited on 14 February 2019, at 13:07
(UTC).
Gulag: 15 hits
Last edited on 11
February 2019, at 13:51
Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 0 hits
This page was last edited on 11 February 2019, at 23:04
(UTC).
(2) Wikipedia webpage
on 200YT is obsessed with accusations of Antisemitism, fails to ask why no
English edition
Two Hundred Years Together
Two Hundred Years Together (Russian: Dvesti let vmeste) is a two-volume historical
essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It
was written as a comprehensive history of Jews in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and modern Russia
between the years 1795 and 1995,
especially with regard to government attitudes toward Jews.[1]
Solzhenitsyn published this two-volume work on the history
of Russian–Jewish relations in 2001
and 2002. The book stirred
controversy, and many historians reported it as unreliable in factual data. Some historians classified it as
antisemitic.[2][3][4][5][6] The book
was published in French and German in 2002–2003. A partial English translation is found in "The
Solzhenitsyn Reader".[7]
Summary
In the first volume, Solzhenitsyn discusses the history of
Russians and the 100,000 Jews that
had migrated to Russia between 1772 and the revolution of 1917. He asserts that
the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire were not
government-sponsored but spontaneous acts of violence, except for some government
culpability in the Pale of
Settlement. Solzhenitsyn says that life for Russian Jews was hard but no harder than life for Russian
peasants.[1] The second volume covers
the post-revolution era up to 1970 when many Jews left Russia for Israel and other western countries.[8]
Solzhenitsyn says that the Jews who
participated in Russian revolutions were effectively apostates splitting from the spirit of
tradition.[1] Solzhenitsyn emphatically
denies that Jews were responsible for the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. At the end of chapter nine,
Solzhenitsyn denounces "the
superstitious faith in the historical potency of conspiracies" that leads some to blame the Russian
revolutions on the Jews and to ignore
the "Russian failings that determined our sad historical decline."[9]
Solzhenitsyn criticizes the "scandalous" weakness and
"unpardonable inaction" that
prevented the Russian imperial state from adequately protecting the lives and property of
its Jewish subjects. But he claims
that the pogroms were in almost every case organized from "below" and not by the Russian state
authorities. He criticizes the
"vexing," "scandalous", and "distressing" restrictions on the civil liberties of Jewish subjects during
the final decades of the Russian old
regime. On that score, in chapter ten of the work he expresses his admiration for the efforts of Pyotr
Stolypin (Prime Minister of Russia
from 1906 until 1911) to eliminate all legal disabilities against Jews in Russia.
In the spirit of his 1974 essay "Repentance and
Self-Limitation in the Life of
Nations",[10] Solzhenitsyn calls for the
Russians and Russian Jews alike to take responsibility for the "renegades"
in both communities who
supported a totalitarian and terrorist regime after 1917. At the end of chapter 15, he
writes that Jews must answer for the
"revolutionary cutthroats" in their ranks just as Russians must repent "for the pogroms,
for...merciless arsonist peasants,
for...crazed revolutionary soldiers." It is not, he adds, a matter of answering "before other peoples, but
to oneself, to one's conscience, and
before God."[11]
Solzhenitsyn also takes the anti-Communist White Movement to
task for condoning violence against
Jews and thus undermining "what would have been the chief benefit of a White
victory" in the Russian Civil War:
"a reasonable evolution of the Russian state."
Reception
The reception of Two Hundred Years Together has been quite
varied. Historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern of
Northwestern University published a
refutation of Solzhenitsyn's claims and has accused him of anti-Semitism. On the other hand,
historians such as Geoffrey Hosking[12]
and Robert Service have defended Solzhenitsyn against his opponents. Service has argued that
from what he has read about the
book, Solzhenitsyn is "absolutely
right," Jews were disproportionately represented in the early Soviet
bureaucracy. Service also notes that
Solzhenitsyn is very far from the anti-Semitism of the extreme Russian Right and addresses this issue in a
moderate and responsible manner.[13]
In a review of volume 1 of Two Hundred Years Together that appeared in The New Republic[14]
Critics focus on Solzhenitsyn's insistence that Jews were as
much perpetrators as victims in the communist repression, and that both Russians and Jews need to acknowledge
their share of sin.[15] Questions
related to Jewish participation in
the three Revolutions have been
controversial. Vassili Berezhkov, a
retired KGB colonel and historian of
the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), said that: "The question of
ethnicity did not have any
importance either in the revolution or the story of the NKVD. This was a social revolution and those who
served in the NKVD and Cheka were
serving ideas of social change. If
Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase
the passions of anti-Semitism, which has deep roots in Russian
history. I think it is better not to
discuss such a question now."[13] Others feel that Jews were not implicated enough to warrant a
reference to Russian antisemitism,
or that any notion of the collective
responsibility should be
avoided.[15]
Solzhenitsyn asserted that Jews were overrepresented in the
early Bolshevik leadership and the
security apparatus, without citing his
sources. He wrote that "from 22 ministers in the first Soviet government three were Russian, one
Georgian, one Armenian and 17
Jews".[16] This assertion has been deemed inaccurate, with the argument that the number of Commissars
in the first Soviet government on 7
November 1917 was 15, not 22, of whom 11 were ethnic Russians (Milyutin, Yelizarov, Skvortsov,
Lomov, Rykov, Lenin, Shlyapnikov,
Nogin, Antonov-Ovseenko, Krylenko and Avilov), two Ukrainians (Lunacharsky and Dybenko), one Pole
(Teodorovich), and only one Jew
(Trotsky).[17]
Solzhenitsyn stated: "I had to bury many comrades at the
front, but not once did I have to
bury a Jew". He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a
much easier life in the GULAG camps
that he was interned in.[18][19]
Richard Pipes review
The book has been described by historian Richard Pipes of Harvard University as "a conscious effort to
show empathy for both sides," and
exonerating Jews for responsibility for the revolution: "No, in no way can it be said that Jews 'made' the
revolution of 1905 or 1917 as it was
not made by another nation taken as a whole". At the same time Pipes notes that Solzhenitsyn is "too
eager to exonerate czarist Russia of
mistreating its Jewish subjects, and as a consequence is insensitive to the Jews'
predicament".[20] In Richard Pipes' opinion, the book absolves Solzhenitsyn from
the taint of antisemitism, although he thinks the author’s
nationalism prevents him from being
fully impartial, and that Solzhenitsyn is using outdated and inadequate sources. Pipes asserts that
Solzhenitsyn failed to consider the
"poisonous atmosphere in which Jews lived for generations in the Russian empire (an atmosphere
originating in Russian Orthodox and
nationalist circles)". In particular, Pipes notes that Solzhenitsyn failed to discuss The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, a Russian
anti-Semitic forgery.[20][21]
Petrovsky-Shtern critique
Solzhenitsyn was accused by the Northwestern University
historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
of using unreliable and manipulated figures, while ignoring evidence unfavorable to
his own point of view and, in
particular, ignoring numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history.[22] Petrovsky says
that Solzhenitsyn claims that Jews
promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and "strangled" the
Russian merchant class in Moscow.[23]
He says that according to Solzhenitsyn, Jews are non-producing people ("??")[24] and refuse to engage in
factory labor.[25] They are averse to
agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina,
or in Palestine,[26] and the author
blames the Jews' own behavior for pogroms.[27] He says that Solzhenitsyn also claims that Jews
used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into
heresy,[28] seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion,[29] provoked sectarianism and weakened the
financial system,[30] committed
murders on the orders of qahal authorities,[31] and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary
government.[32] Petrovsky summarizes
his critique by stating that "200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of
russophone antisemitica."
Semyon Reznik review
A critical analysis was published by the Russian-American
historian Semyon Reznik. According
to Reznik, Solzhenitsyn is careful in his vocabulary, generous in compliments
toward Jews and maintains a neutral
tone throughout, but at the same time he not only condones repressive measures against Jews, but
justifies them as intended for
protection of the rights of Russians as the titular nation that supposedly "greatly suffered from
Jewish exploitation, alcohol
mongering, usury and corruption of the traditional way of life".[33]
Other critiques
Historian and demographer Sergey Maksudov referred to THYT as "a
piece of pseudoscientific essayism", which
promulgates numerous antisemitic
stereotypes of Jews as professional
parasites, infiltrators into the Russian culture, and portrays repressive
policies toward Jews as being "in
Jews' own interests". Maksudov also claims that Solzhenitsyn was insensitive toward Jewish sufferings
during pogroms in general, and the
Kishinev pogrom in particular, and also accuses Solzhenitsyn of denying many well documented
atrocities.[34]
John Klier, a
historian at University College London, describes the charges of anti-Semitism as "misguided", but at
the same time writes that in his
account of the pogroms of the early 20th century, Solzhenitsyn is far more concerned
with exonerating the good name of
the Russian people than he is with the suffering of the Jews, and he accepts the tsarist government's
canards blaming the pogroms on
provocations by the Jews themselves.[35]
A detailed analysis of THYT and an overview of critical
opinion thereon was published by the
University of Waterloo professor Zinaida
Gimpelevich. According to Gimpelevich, the critical opinion worldwide overwhelmingly tilts against
Solzhenitsyn.[36]
Grigory Baklanov,
a Russian novelist, in his critical study described Two Hundred Years as "worthless as
historical scholarship". Baklanov,
himself a World War II veteran, focuses on Solzhenitsyn's insistence on Jews' supposed wartime cowardice
and unwillingness to face the enemy,
which he says is contradicted both by the statistics of Jewish frontline casualties and by the high
number of Jews decorated for bravery
in battle.[37]
Literary historian Leonid Katsis accuses Solzhenitsyn of
numerous manipulated and selective
quotations in the first volume of the book, detrimental to its
trustworthiness.[38] Cultural historian and comparatist Elisa Kriza discusses THYT
in an article about anti-Semitism in
Solzhenitsyn's works and explains how Solzhenitsyn's accusations towards Jewish people as a
group and his treatment of Russian
Jews as "foreign", despite being in Russia for two hundred years, are evidence of anti-Semitic rhetoric in the
book.[39]
Historians Leybelman,
Levinskaya, and Abramov claim that Solzhenitsyn uncritically used writings of
antisemitic pseudo-historian[40] Andrey
Dikiy for his inflated statistical data of Jewish participation in the early Soviet government and its
security apparatus.[33][41][42][43]
Mark Deutch, in a two-part review titled "A Shameless
Classic" ("??),[44][45] lists
numerous drawbacks, stemming, in his
opinion, from biased exposition, ignoring well-known sources, self-contradictions, and factual
errors.
References
Shneidman, S. S.
(2004). Russian Literature, 1995–2002: On the
Threshold of the New Millennium (2 ed.). University of
Toronto Press.
pp. 46–47. ISBN 0802086705.
"? ?? ? ? ?".
Grani.ru. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
? ?.? "200 ? ?" ? ??
? (in Russian).
Berkovich-zametki.com. Retrieved 2013-11-25.
Dimensional Spaces in
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years
Together. By Zinaida Gimpelevich ("[200] has evoked strong
reactions
from many scholars, who doubt in particular his factual data
and
ideological approach to the history of Russian Jews and their
history
in the Russian and Soviet Empires.")
"VOstrovsky1.htm".
Berkovich-zametki.com. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
"22". Sunround.com.
Retrieved 2013-10-05.
Mahoney, Daniel J.;
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich; Edward L. Beach
Jr (2009). The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential
Writings,
1947–2005. Lanham, MD: Intercollegiate Studies Institute. pp.
488–507.
ISBN 1-935191-55-1.
Mahoney, Daniel J.;
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich; Edward L. Beach
Jr (2009). The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential
Writings,
1947–2005. Lanham, MD: Intercollegiate Studies Institute. p.
486. ISBN
1-935191-55-1.
The Solzhenitsyn
Reader, p. 496
The Solzhenitsyn
Reader, pp. 527–555
The Solzhenitsyn
Reader, p. 505
"The Times Literary
Supplement | TLS". Tls.timesonline.co.uk.
Retrieved 2013-10-05.
Walsh, Nick Paton
(January 25, 2003). "Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo
of the revolution". The Guardian.
The New Republic,
November 25, 2002
Cathy Young:
Traditional Prejudices. The anti-Semitism of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn Reason Magazine May, 2004.
"200 years
together":"... ? ? ?? ? ??: ?? ?
?? ?? ? – ?? ?, ?? ??, ?? ?... ?
??, ? ? ?... ?, ?? ? ?, ?
?, ? ??."
"If I would care to
generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews
in the camps was especially hard, I could, and would not face
reproach
for an unjust national generalisation. But in the camps where
I was
kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw –
their life
was softer than that of others.| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
2003
Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution by Nick
Paton Walsh,
The Guardian, January 25, 2003
Richard Pipes:
"Solzhenitsyn and the Jews, revisited: Alone Together"
The New Republic November 25, 2002
Richard Pipes:
Solzhenitsyn's Troubled Prophetic Mission Archived
2009-01-09 at the Wayback Machine The Moscow Times August 7,
2008.
Also in The St. Petersburg Times August 8, 2008.[1]
"Stern o knige
Solzenizin 200 Let ldn-knigi". Ldn-knigi.lib.ru.
Retrieved 2013-10-05.
pp. 39–41, 47
pp. 52, 59
?. 244–245
pp. 73, 76, 157, 256,
258, 267–268
pp. 210, 483, 120
p. 20
p. 21
p. 70
p. 87
p. 57
"? ?: ? ? ? [Win]".
Vestnik.com. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
? ?. "?? ??".
Guelman.ru. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
"History Today",
November 2002
[2][dead link]
"? ?. ?". Lib.ru.
Retrieved 2013-10-05.
"? ?".
Exlibris.ng.ru. 2001-07-12. Archived from the
original on 2012-07-07. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
Kriza, Elisa (2016).
"Der Antisemitismus im Werk von
Alexander
Solschenizyn und seine Rezeption". Jahrbuch für
Antisemitismusforschung. 25:
193–214.
"?? ? ?". Lebed.com.
Retrieved 2013-10-05.
?? ??. "? ?? ??, ?? ?
?;
from ? ? "?? ?" ? 2 ??, ?, ?? ?".
Base.ijc.ru. Archived from the original on 2013-10-06.
Retrieved
2013-10-05.
"? ?, ? ? ? ?
??".
Russia-talk.org. Retrieved 2013-11-25.
"?? = ? ?? ? ?. ? 1".
Sem40.ru.
Archived from the original on 2013-10-14. Retrieved
2013-11-25.
External links
Interview with Solzhentisyn about "200 Years Together"
Dimensional Spaces in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred
Years
Together. By Zinaida Gimpelevich.
vte
Works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Poetry
Miniatures (1964) Prussian Nights (1974)
Plays
Candle in the Wind (1960) The Love-Girl and the Innocent
(1969)
Novels
The First Circle (1968) Cancer Ward (1968) The Red Wheel
August 1914
(1971) November 1916 (1985) March 1917 (1989) April 1917 (c.
1991)
Short fiction
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962.11) Matryona's
Place
(1963.01) An Incident at Krechetovka Station (1963.01) For
the Good of
the Cause (1963.07)
Non-fiction
The Gulag Archipelago (1973.09–78) The Oak and the Calf
(1975) Two
Hundred Years Together (2003)
Portal-puzzle.svg Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn portal
This page was last edited on 1 February 2019, at 12:20
(UTC).
(3) Solzhenitsyn
family dismisses 'Jewish conspiracy', says no English edition of 200YT; online
editions are illegal
TWO HUNDRED YEARS TOGETHER
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, a
two-volume history of Russian-Jewish relations, initially grew out of The Red Wheel, his
monumental opus on the Russian Revolution. In Two Hundred Years Together,
Solzhenitsyn emphatically denies (in
Chapters 9 and 14) that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were the
result of a "Jewish conspiracy"
(just as he had earlier forcefully criticized the extreme nationalists who
were and are obsessed with Freemasons
and Jews—see, e.g., Russia in Collapse, Chapter 25, “The Maladies of Russian
Nationalism”).
In The Red Wheel
Solzhenitsyn had shown the Revolution in full complexity; and indeed—to
avoid boiling down that complexity or skewing it via the narrow prism of
Russian-Jewish relations—he gave The Red
Wheel priority of publication in every major language, ahead of Two Hundred
Years Together. And so likewise in English, an authorized translation of Two
Hundred Years Together will follow The Red Wheel.
Two Hundred Years Together was first published in Russian in the 1990s,
and several times since. The definitive Russian edition is published by Vremya
(Moscow, 2015), as volumes 26 & 27 of their ongoing 30-volume collected
works of Solzhenitsyn.
An authorized French translation is published in two volumes
by Fayard.
Deux siècles ensemble, tome 1 : Juifs et Russes avant la
révolution
Deux siècles ensemble, tome 2 : Juifs et Russes pendant la
période soviétique
An authorized German translation is published in two volumes
by Herbig, and can be found here:
Zweihundert Jahre zusammen
With respect to an English edition—to recapitulate the
above—an authorized translation of the full work is firmly in the plans, but awaits the completion of English
publication of The Red Wheel. Therefore, no information is yet available
regarding a specific publication timeline.
Meanwhile, readers need to be forewarned that any and all
English versions available on the Internet (with two important exceptions listed
below) are illegal, pirated, and/or
entirely unauthorized; often poorly and loosely translated; and redact
passages, and indeed whole chapters, that apparently do not support the prejudices of those
behind these illegal editions.
Editors’ Introduction, Author’s Introduction, and excerpts
from Chapters 8,9,15,16, translated by Alexis Klimoff & Stephan
Solzhenitsyn, available in The Solzhenitsyn Reader. - Download (pdf)
Author’s Introduction
and the complete Chapter 11, translated by Jamey Gambrell, published in Common
Knowledge, vol. 9, issue 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 204–27. - Download (pdf)
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first interview
with Viktor Loshak, Moscow News, 20 June 2001 - Download (pdf)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, second interview with Viktor Loshak,
Moscow News, 1 January 2003 - Download (pdf)
Daniel J. Mahoney, "In Search of Mutual Understanding: Solzhenitsyn on
Russia’s 'Jewish Question’" - Download (pdf)
Geoffrey Hosking, Times Literary Supplement review of Russian
edition, 1 March 2002 - Download (pdf)
Richard Pipes, New Republic review of Russian edition, 25
November 2002 - Download (pdf)?
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