Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Moscow, Russky put, 2002.
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn published the first volume of Two Hundred Years Together, his history of Russian-Jewish coexistence, he said he was trying to bring sobriety to a topic all too often approached with overwrought emotion. Rather than a politicized polemic, he said, his work would be an impartial accounting of facts, leaving the reader free to draw conclusions. He predicted controversy, but he pined for understanding.
"The history of the 'Jewish question' in Russia is, first and foremost, rich," reads the preface to the first book. "To write about it requires listening to new voices and bringing them to the reader. But public discourse puts you on the knife's edge. From both sides, you can sense all the possible, impossible, and still growing reproaches and accusations. The feeling that has brought me through this book
is a search for all points of mutual understanding and for all possible paths to a future cleansed of the bitterness of the past."
Clearly, Russia's most famous former dissident did not get the reaction he was looking for. When the first volume, covering the period from 1795 to 1917, was released in June 2001, critics charged that it was too slow to criticize the excesses of the czarist regime, that Solzhenitsyn's monarchist and Orthodox leanings left him blind to state-sponsored anti-Semitism, from pogroms to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Expected in a matter of months, volume two arrived in Moscow bookstores a full year and a half later. If, however, Solzhenitsyn used that time to reflect and revise, he is likely to be disappointed once again--the second tome, covering the period from 1917 to 1995, looks set to arouse even more controversy than the first.
RENEGADES AND REVOLUTIONARIES
Like the first volume, the book is an almost encyclopedic collection of quotations and citations. Footnotes in each chapter number nearly 200. The sources are varied, ranging from Soviet archives to the memoirs of Soviet Jews and the pages of the Israeli press. The research is careful and transparently presented.
But in contrast to the earlier volume, Solzhenitsyn now approaches Soviet Jewish history not as a narrative but as a conversation. Moving through the chronology, the book is driven not by events but by ideas. Solzhenitsyn has broken the "Jewish question" down into dozens of sub-questions, and--although he initially promised to leave conclusions up to individual readers--he makes valiant attempts to answer all of them.
To start, he takes up and debunks the refrain--often heard in the aftermath of the Soviet Union--that Bolshevism was a Jewish phenomenon. The revolutions, first in February 1917 and then in November, were "done by Russian hands and Russian rashness." Nonetheless, he explains, it was Jews who benefited from them more than any other group, finally gaining access to Moscow and Petrograd, as well as universities, professional guilds, and politics. As a result--and because there was nothing in the old regime to engender Jewish loyalty, while a non-czarist future seemed to hold great promise--Jewish participation, at least in the February revolution, is understandable, Solzhenitsyn writes.
But from there he goes on, for the better part of two chapters, to list the Jews who rose to prominence among the Bolsheviks. Special attention, not surprisingly, is reserved for Leon Trotsky, who organized the Party's military wing and went on to lead the Red Army in the Civil War. Trotsky, he writes, is often cited as a prime example of how the Jews among the Bolsheviks were not Jews at all, but "renegades" who had turned away from their heritage. Solzhenitsyn, though, does not have much patience for that argument.
"Trotsky himself was without doubt an internationalist," he writes, "and we can believe his demonstrative declarations, in which he pushed away from himself everything Jewish--but, judging by his appointments, Jewish renegades were closer to his heart than Russian renegades."
Question after question follow in the chapters to come. Pogroms during the Civil War? Inexcusable, but given the link between the Jews and the Bolsheviks, could anything else have been expected? Public anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s? Jews appeared "too successful" in claiming top Party posts, plus they started moving to the major cities in droves, exacerbating housing shortages.
The book becomes more interesting--and more troublesome--when the story moves into Solzhenitsyn's own lifeline, starting with his chapter on the gulag. "To the extent that it is possible to generalize," he writes, Jews in the gulag "lived easier than anyone else." Jewish commandants, he wrote, made sure Jewish inmates didn't starve, while Jewish doctors got them off hard labor. The psychiatric wards--which Solzhenitsyn describes as the cushiest parts of the camps--were heavily overpopulated with Jews. For the preponderance of Jews in the gulag bureaucracy, meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn finds only one answer: the desire for revenge.
He runs into more minefields in the next chapter, on World War II. After a detailed and unwavering account of the Holocaust on Soviet territory--an important undertaking, given the paucity of Russian literature on the subject--he condemns the reticence of both ordinary Russians and Russian partisans to help Jews in need. He goes on to debunk the myth that Jews were underrepresented in the Soviet army, although he argues anecdotally that most Jews still kept far from the front, which he attributes to "divided loyalties." The most troubling moment in the book, however, comes at the end of the chapter, when--as he does in every chapter--he tries to make sense of it all. And the only explanation he can find for the Holocaust is that it was a punishment: divine punishment for turning away from the Torah, and earthly punishment for plunging headlong into Bolshevism.
RHETORICAL ANSWERS?
Like the first book, meanwhile, volume two is notable for what it doesn't include. There are extensive lists and biographies of prominent Jewish Party members, but hardly a mention of Jewish participation in the avant-garde movement of the 1920s or the samizdat movement that gave Solzhenitsyn his start. The murder on Stalin's orders of the prominent Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels in 1948, which convinced Soviet Jews of the anti-Semitic nature of Stalin's later terrors, receives no more than two sentences. The role the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee played in raising funds for the war effort is treated in a handful of paragraphs. The virulent anti-Semitism that erupted during the waning days of glasnost--and the nexus of nationalist groups like Pamyat with elements of the Russian Orthodox Church--are also not explored. Indeed, for a book ostensibly about Jews and Russians, Russians themselves are conspicuously absent.
Solzhenitsyn does not turn a blind eye to Soviet anti-Semitism. He blasts both Khrushchev and Brezhnev for the Kremlin's wild anti-Zionist campaigns--culminating in the aftermath of the Six Day War--which served to galvanize Jewish emigration and prove once again that Jews could not feel at home in Russia. And he has high praise for the Jews among the dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s, although he laments that none of them seemed willing to apologize for their brethren's role in the revolution.
But he also has no patience for the accusations more recent Jewish writers have made against Russia, particularly Soviet Russia. Jews and Russians, he argues, worked together to oppress Jews, Russians, and myriad other nations. Russians, he writes, have recognized their guilt; it is time for Jews to do the same, and just as Russians are wrong to blame Jews for all of their ills, so are Jews wrong to scapegoat Russians.
As Solzhenitsyn's history draws to an end, he laments the mass Jewish emigration, starting from the '70s through to the present day, as yet more proof that Jews and Russians still haven't learned to live together. Jews, he writes, have never felt at home in Russia, even when revolution removed the barriers they faced. He is skeptical of Zionism as a motivation here, writing: "Soviet Jews who were able to emigrate loudly cried: 'Let my people go!' That was an incomplete quote. In the Bible it reads: 'Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the desert' (Exodus 5:1). But somehow, many of those let go went not to the desert, but to bountiful America."
As for those Jews who have stayed, Solzhenitsyn continues to see little hope of constructive coexistence. "The key," he writes, "is not in the fatalism of heritage, not in blood, not in genes, but in whose pain hits closest to the heart: Jewish pain, or that of the core nation, among whom one grew up?"
And for Solzhenitsyn, the answer seems clear: assimilation, such that Jews in Russia would no longer distinguish between Jewish pain and Russian pain.
"So far, assimilation has not been very convincing," he writes. "The problem of assimilation remains difficult to resolve. And although from a broad perspective the process of assimilation has gone quite far, we cannot then conclude that the Diaspora has been dismantled."
Indeed, that is what Solzhenitsyn sees as the answer to the Jewish question: the disappearance of the Jewish Diaspora, the total elimination of any distinctions between Jews and Russians, with the possible exception of religion. "There are some bright fates, some individuals who have assimilated in their whole being," he writes, to end the book. "And we in Russia welcome them with all our soul."
It is not an answer Russian Jews are likely to accept. Many Russian Jews, to be honest, would not even accept the question. "I don't have a Jewish question," Evgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, is fond of saying. "I have a Russian question." That, though, is a question to which Solzhenitsyn does not seem to have an answer.
The reviewer read the text of the book posted at http://sila.by.ru.