In fact, Solzhenitsyn was not representative of Russian, excuse me, rossiiskii, public opinion. Since his appraisal of the USSR is diametrically opposite to theirs, after all... He was seen as a Man of Consience with some far-out ideas.
Anyway, I will make a few comments about Diaspora Disease, sometimes known as Plastic Paddy syndrome -- be it Irish, Ukrainian, White Russian, Jewish or what-have-you. It is very marked, and the reason why emigree Irish/Ukrainians/etc. are usually much more nationalistic than people who actually live in the country. What you have here is a case of people descended from people who left location X at some particularly personally traumatic point in time, raised on stories of their grandparents who lived through the trauma. This is usually coupled with little or no actual knowledge of the language in the original country, and few or no contacts there. Thus, the image fixed in the Diaspora's mind is a reified image of the place of origin as seen through the eyes of their grandparents. So, descendents of White Russian emigrees are still battling the Reds in their minds. Irish diaspora members think Ireland is covered with idyllic pastoral villages ruled over
by cruel British oppressors, and oh the Famine was deliberately organized by Britain to kill the Irish, when everybody in Ireland knows it was blight. For Ukrainians, there is a Famine going on in Ukraine. For Jews, there are evil pogromshiki everywhere ready to be unleashed at any moment.
--- On Mon, 8/4/08, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk