[lbo-talk] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Aug 4 16:23:28 PDT 2008


I got the idea that Solzhenitsyn was not terribly representative of much Russian opinion after he returned from exile, and felt somewhat out of sorts with the new Russia, so I am not so sure what his attitudes tell us. My brief brush with the 'dissident' Russian diaspora showed me that the their Western handlers were always wincing at the default attitude of the epatriate intelligentsia towards extreme reaction. Solzhenitsyn was a bit of an old curmudgeon in the US, where he was out of sorts with modern America, and seems to have been so on his return.

I think the question of east european attitudes towards Jews and other ethnic minorities is easy to get wrong. I can remember an excruciating holiday in (then) Czechoslvakia with an Indian friend (who was often taken for a gypsy). All of our party were astonished not at the prejudices - coming from London you could hardly say that we had no experience of race prejudice against Indians. But what was unexpected was the bluntness with which the prejudices were expressed. On the other side of the iron curtain, there never was that politically correct veneer of apology covering up the hostilities underneath (or if there was it was discredited, being associated with authorities that were without authority). I do hear Russians and Poles in London express a kind of casual anti-Semitism that shows that they do not understand the minefield of western race relations. But whether it represents an endemic anti-Semitic movement in those societies, I doubt.

Also, you have to control for the ideological presentation of East Europeans as anti-Semites in western accounts. There is an expectation among west Europeans and Americans that east Europeans are anti-Semitic and racist. It is in fact itself a racial caricature, a western prejudice against people from east Europe and Russia.



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