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Solzhenitsyn Book Infuriates Russian Jews
News Max ^ | Jan. 25, 2003

Posted on 01/27/2003 3:10:30 PM PST by Ivan the Terrible

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's charge in his latest book that Jews were as much perpetrators of Soviet communist repression as they were its victims has infuriated Russian Jews, who say that the book is filled with inaccuracies.

One prominent Jewish leader told Britain's Guardian newspaper that the book was without merit.

"This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes," Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress told the Guardian. "Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews.

"This is not a book about how the Jews and Russians lived together for 200 years, but one about how they lived apart after finding themselves on the same territory. This book is a weak one professionally. Factually, it is so bad as to be beyond criticism. As literature, it is not of any merit."

In the book, "Two Hundred Years Together," Solzhenitsyn, 84, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for being the first to expose the horrors of the Stalinist gulag [the chain of brutal Soviet prison camps where he was imprisoned], deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims.

One charge that has Russian Jews angry was his claim that "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."

He then adds: "But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police - forerunners of the KGB] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect."

According to the Guardian, the book's title refers to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population. Three chapters discuss the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

Solzhenitsyn argues that Russia must come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary genocides - and that its Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them.

"My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and the psychology of the Jews - their spiritual component," he said. "I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited. Zhabotinsky [a Jewish writer] once said that the best service our Russian friends give to us is never to speak aloud about us."

DM Thomas, one of Solzhenitsyn's biographers, told the Guardian that he did not think the book was fuelled by anti-Semitism. "I would not doubt his sincerity. He says that he firmly supports the state of Israel. In his fiction and factual writing there are Jewish characters that he writes about who are bright, decent, anti-Stalinist people."

Professor Robert Service of Oxford University, an expert on 20th century Russian history, praised the book saying what he has read about it shows that Solzhenitsyn was "absolutely right".

While researching a book on Lenin, Prof Service told the Guardian that he came across details of how Trotsky, who was of Jewish origin, asked the politburo in 1919 to ensure that Jews were enrolled in the Red army. Trotsky said that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka.

"Trotsky's idea was that the spread of anti-Semitism was [partly due to] objections about their entrance into the civil service. There is something in this; that they were not just passive spectators of the revolution. They were part-victims and part-perpetrators."

Less complimentary was Vassili Berezhkov, a retired KGB colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB) who told the Guardian that he failed to see the need for Solzhenitsyn's reopening past wounds at this time.

"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," he explained.

"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."


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Russia
KEYWORDS: czarist; royalist; russia; solzhenitsyn
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To: Argus
Now Stalin - there was a real anti-Semite.

I read somewhere that he was married to a Jew.

41 posted on 01/27/2003 6:53:28 PM PST by DensaMensa
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To: bribriagain
May God punish those who did this. I just hope they were not secular jews.

It was common for Jewish teachers and clergy to be imprisoned for teaching and practicing Judaism in the Soviet Union. There were spies in every community. Jews, spying on Jews. I am not sure that I would call the informers "secular" Jews, but rather hateful of religion. The Russian name for them were "yevseksia".-

Joke-

A Soviet officer approaches a bearded Jew in Moscow and pronounces in Russian:

Ahh, you Jews are all going to Hell anyway!

The Jew replies in Russian:

That's OK, I already speak the language....

42 posted on 01/27/2003 7:02:44 PM PST by Nachum
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To: TexanToTheCore
Many Jews felt, as they do now, that they were the underdogs and tended to gravitate to underdog political movements. There is nothing new to this information.

You are correct. Of the 3,300 Jews in the original 13 colonies (mainly in NY, RI, PA and SC) they were (essentially) all on the Patriot side.

43 posted on 01/27/2003 7:04:27 PM PST by Pharmboy (Dems lie 'cause they have to)
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To: PaulJ
It was a common communist practice in the Ukraine and Poland to blame all the crimes of Communism on the Jews, even as Jews were disproportionate victims.
The commies used anti-Semetism as a shield and a sword against Jews.

Jews certainly were disproportionately involved in the Communist PArty, and all other anti Tzarist parties. As such Jews were victims and victimizers.
However, I question the "Jewishness" of any communist.
The Communist Jews like Leon Bronstein (Trtsky) were no more Jewish than Joseph Dgashvili (Stalin) was Orthodox.
However, some Russian communists under Khruschev tried to blame Stalin's crimes on Stalin and the "Georgian mafia".

Frankly, rational factual and evenhanded discussion of all racialinvolvment in the Communist party is warrented. Jews should not be singled out, but neither should they be protected.

44 posted on 01/27/2003 7:34:38 PM PST by rmlew
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To: cynicom
They also then virtualy banned practice of Judaism and jailed Rabbis and Zionist.
Furthermore, Jews were disporportionate victims of the anti-Kulak campaigns.
Finally, note Stalin's "Doctor's" Plot" and attemtp to decimate Soviet Jewry by forced relocation to Birobaizhian.
45 posted on 01/27/2003 7:39:55 PM PST by rmlew
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To: Nachum
You do realize that Baba Yar was perpetrated by the Nazies, right? Besides, the fact is, in the 1920s Jews occupied most of the high positions in the Communist party, to include the terror apparatus....these were not religeous Jews but they were Jews by ethnicity. You are going to try now to disprove or slam me for stating a fact, then I'm going to repost the list I posted last time you did this with all the names and positions...so lets not go down that trail again. Do you think Jews are a blameless people? Sorry to burst your bubble, but they are no more blameless then any other people. All races of man have sinned against God, to include the Jews....all races of men have produced evil sociopaths, to deny this is reverse racism.
46 posted on 01/31/2003 10:22:11 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: unspun
You see, there are two forces at work here: hyper sensitivity and PCness on the part of even conservative jews to any criticism of jews (and for the record I'm about half jewish...and half Russian...so when the regular crowd starts screaming racist or what ever, they can screw themselves) and the second force is a superiority attitude that says "How could we have ever stooped to the level of others?". I find both sickening.
47 posted on 01/31/2003 10:26:35 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: eclectic
Sorry to bust in on your reality, but one can be an anti-Zionist (a socialist philosophy) without being anti-Semite...quite a few Jews are for that matter, especially the religious ones...
48 posted on 01/31/2003 10:30:36 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: Cicero
By the way, it was Alexander II who was assassinated and only one of the perpetrators was a Jew...a woman at that.
49 posted on 01/31/2003 10:35:03 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: Stavka2
Sorry to bust in on your reality, but one can be an anti-Zionist (a socialist philosophy) without being anti-Semite...quite a few Jews are for that matter, especially the religious ones...

Hear hear.

50 posted on 01/31/2003 10:36:44 PM PST by Askel5
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To: Francisco
.
51 posted on 01/31/2003 10:37:47 PM PST by Askel5
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To: rmlew
Jews in this case has nothing to do with religion and is meant as a nationality.
52 posted on 01/31/2003 10:54:12 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: rmlew
By the way, how can Jews have been the dispraportionate victems of anti-Kulak campeigns when kulak's (fists) were the middle class farmers of the old Empire, almost all Russians/Ukrainians and Belarussians?
53 posted on 01/31/2003 10:55:39 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: Stavka2
Not completely unrelated...

The thing I find amusing/ironic/tragic is when folks talk as if the Hebrews developed the concept of morality (based upon narrative lies they presented as God's own truth, of course, as the humanistic story goes).
54 posted on 02/01/2003 12:28:09 AM PST by unspun ("What is man, that You are mindful of him?")
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To: Stavka2
Sorry to burst your bubble, but they are no more blameless then any other people

You aren't bursting my buble. I know quite well that Jews aren't perfect. I just take offense at cheap shots taken by those who have little authority to make them. As far as Baba Yar is concerned, there were plenty of locals who helped the Nazis. These types of events are conveniently forgotton by those who do wish to "slam" Jews. After so many years of getting "slammed" it gets a bit old.

No knock on you, or on your post. It is true, there were Jews in high places in the communist government, but it is a little like saying that there were Jews in high places in Spain before the inquisistion. The term "useful idiots" works quite well for them.

55 posted on 02/01/2003 7:00:56 PM PST by Nachum
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To: Nachum
These people were more then useful idiots, they were running the show in the 20's. It's like saying the Jews in Spain started the Inquisition. As for authority, he was there, he saw what he saw...no one was bitching when he slammed Russian Communists....not you not anyone. As for Baba Yar, go and bitch at the Catholic Ukrainians who did it, not the Orthodox Russians.
56 posted on 02/02/2003 4:50:47 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: Stavka2
Running the show? What was their fate under Stalin? Stalin let them do his dirty work. Not far different than the Jews of Spain at all. Not different than the Jews in France who supported Napoleon. Not different than the Jews who fought for the Kaiser in WWI.

As far as "bitching" about his writings on the Gulags, why should anyone want to? That's like rewarding Werner Von Braun's helping American's space program, while ignoring his V2 rockets. "Hey, he built good rockets".-

As far as Russian communists are concerned, there are plenty of prisons in communist Russia that murdered plenty of Jews in the 20's. Fine, Baba Yar was the Ukraine. Lefertovo prison was in Russia.

57 posted on 02/02/2003 6:47:13 PM PST by Nachum
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To: Nachum
Point is, there were plenty of Orthodox Christians and priests/monks/nuns who were sent to those camps by persons of Jewish nationality, who were running the show for Lenin and in the 30's for Stalin. The revolution they helped start and run simply ate it's own, just like the French Revolution did. You have no problem condemning Russsians or others for their part in the Communist holocust, but God forbid, someone points out that Jews were equally guilty in it as were Russians....then you tap dance and become extremely PC.

Jewish leaders have as much blame (and in the 20's it was almost all their blame...that's reality....Trotsky ran quite a bit of the show and almost got a hold of the Soviet Union in whole....and he was master of the terror) as Russian or Ukrainian leaders. So stop trying to turn the blame over only on Russians while excusing Jews from their share.

What pisses me off about all this and so many Jews suffer from this schlorosiss is that they can't seperate the Jewish individuals from the mass. If a Jew is guilty of something, then by this thinking, all Jews are guilty, so we had best find a way to squirm the guilt off of the individual, least all Jews get tarred. In it's own stupidity, this mindset only propogates a "collective" guilt reality. Think on it.

58 posted on 02/02/2003 7:01:09 PM PST by Stavka2
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To: Nachum; rmlew; Askel5; PaulJ; Alouette; Argus; aristeides; riri; A. Pole; TexanToTheCore

The Prop-Masters

© 2000

Perpetrators of the holocaust against Christian Russia transform themselves into "survivors" of a holocaust.

The portraits at left are of the same man but in two different incarnations. On the far left we see Martin "Gray" in retirement after a successful career peddling fake antiques to gullible collectors. He is holding his mass market paperback, For Those I Loved, which is filled with his exploits as a saintly "Holocaust Survivor" who was supposedly forced to help clear bodies out of the Treblinka "gas chamber." The earlier portrait is of the youthful Gray as a highly-decorated officer in the Soviet NKVD (the savage forerunner of the KGB), responsible for the murder of millions of Christians in Russia and Eastern Europe. Even Establishment researchers have had to admit that Gray's book is as phony as the antiques he peddled. But Gray's scam is symbolic of countless other Communist ghouls who have managed to land on their feet in the West, disguised as poor, persecuted "Survivors of the Holocaust" and feted as the saints and martyrs of the universe. Meanwhile the holocaust they perpetrated against millions of Christians slips further down the dark environs of Orwell's memory hole. Political analyst Joseph Sobran points out that the revelation of this "ethnic component" of Communism contests a cherished historical lie: "...the ethnic history of Communism is likely to complicate the conventional 'lachrymose version of Jewish history,' according to which Jews are always and everywhere innocent victims of Gentile prejudice and persecution."

The top Communist Jewish official Zinoviev stated: "Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritzky, Zinoviev and Vólodarsky, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeoisie--more blood! As much as possible!" (Krasnaya Gazeta, Sept. 1, 1918).

Leon Bronstein (Trotsky): supreme commander of the Soviet Red Army.

Grigory Apfelbaum (Zinoviev): executive, Soviet Secret Police. S

Solomon Lozovsky: deputy Soviet foreign minister.

Maxim Wallach (Litvinov): Soviet foreign minister.

Yuri Andropov: director, Soviet KGB, later supreme dictator of the Soviet Union.

Jacob Sverdlov: first president of the Soviet Union. Sverdlov ordered the massacre of the Czar's family-women and children-in the town named after Catherine the Great, Yekaterinburg, (renamed Sverdlovsk in 1924 in honor of the murderer).

Jacob Yurovsky: commander, Soviet Secret Police. Yurovsky led the death squad which carried out Sverdlov's order for the murder of the Czar's family, including the bayoneting to death of the Czar's daughters. The Ipatyev house, where, in the basement, the massacre had occurred, stood intact until 1977, when the local Communist party boss at that time, Boris Yeltsin, ordered it demolished, lest it become a shrine to anti-Jewish sentiment.

Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich (pictured at left): chief mass murderer for Stalin, ordered the deaths of millions and the wholesale destruction of Christian monuments and churches, including the great Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Standing amid the rubble of the cathedral, Kaganovich proclaimed, "Mother Russia is cast down. We have ripped away her skirts." (N.Y. Times, Sept. 26, 1995).

Mikhail Kaganovich: deputy commissar of heavy industry, supervisor of slave labor, brother of Lazar. Rosa Kaganovich: Stalin's mistress; sister of Lazar. Paulina Zhemchuzina: member of the Central Committee and wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov.

Olga Bronstein: officer, Soviet Cheka Secret Police, sister of Trotsky, wife of Kamenev.

Genrikh Yagoda: chief of Soviet Secret Police, mass murderer extraordinaire. (Jewish poet Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize, wrote a hymn of praise to Yagoda).

Matvei Berman and Naftaly Frenkel: founders, the Gulag death camp system.

Lev Inzhir, commissar for Soviet death camp transit and administration.

Boris Berman: executive officer of the Soviet Secret Police and brother of Matvei. K.V. Pauker: chief of operations, Soviet NKVD Secret Police.

Firin, Rappoport, Kogan, Zhuk: commissars of death camps and slave labor, supervised the mass deaths of laborers during the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal.

M.I. Gay: commander, Soviet Secret Police.

Slutsky and Shpiegelglas: commanders, Soviet Secret Police.

Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin (Aleksandr Orlov): commander, Soviet Red Army; officer, Soviet Secret Police. Feldbin was chief of Soviet Security in the Spanish Civil War. He supervised the massacre of Catholic priests and peasants in Spain.

Yona Yakir: general, Soviet Red Army, member of the Central Committee.

Dimitri Shmidt: general, Soviet Red Army.

Yakov ("Yankel") Kreiser: general, Soviet Red Army.

Miron Vovsi: general, Soviet Red Army.

David Dragonsky: general, Soviet Red Army, Hero of the Soviet Union.

Grigori Shtern: general, Soviet Red Army.

Mikhail Chazkelevich: general, Soviet Red Army.

Shimon Kirvoshein: general, Soviet Red Army.

Arseni Raskin: deputy-commander, Soviet Red Army.

Haim Fomin, commander of Brest-Litovsk, Soviet Red Army. At least one hundred Soviet generals were Jewish (cf. Canadian Jewish News, April 19, 1989).

Sergei Eisenstein: director of communist propaganda films which depicted Christian peasants (kulaks) as hideous, money-grabbing parasites. The kulaks were subsequently massacred. (Cf. for example Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow). I will make a note here that Jewish Kulaks, like the family of one of my great grandfathers, were equally massacred. He gained his land as a pomestniya from the Tsar for meritorious service in battle.

In a leaflet addressed to Soviet troops, Ehrenburg wrote: "...the Germans are not human beings...nothing gives us so much joy as German corpses."(Anatol Goldberg, Ilya Ehrenburg, p. 197). Goldberg concedes that Ehrenburg, "...had always disliked the Germans...now that there was a war on he turned his old prejudice into an asset."(Ibid., p. 193). The Soviet leadership acknowledged that Ehrenburg sought the extermination of the entire German people (cf. Pravda, April 14, 1945. [Pravda was also published in a Yiddish edition, Einikeyt). Ehrenburg won the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize. He willed his papers to the Israeli Yad Vashem 'Holocaust' Museum.

Solomon Mikhoels: commissar of Soviet propaganda.

Nikolai Bukharin: Lenin's chief theorist.

Samuel Agursky: commissar.

Karl Radek: member, Central Committee.

Mikhail Gruzenberg (Borodin) commissar.

A.A. Yoffe: commissar.

David Ryazanov: advisor to Lenin

Lev Rosenfeld (Kamenev): member of the Central Committee.

Ivan Maisky: Soviet Ambassador to Britain. Itzik Solomonovich Feffer: commissar, Soviet Secret Police.

Abraham Sutskever: Soviet terrorist-partisan.

Mark Osipovich Reizen: Soviet propagandist, winner of three Stalin Prizes.

Zakharovich Mekhlis: top executioner for Stalin.

Henrykas Zimanas: leader of Lithuanian communist terrorists

Am I blaming Jews as a race for these crimes and criminals? No, that would be as silly as saying all Germans were and are still guilty for the Nazies and WW2. But to deny that Germans were guilty, or rather the leadership was ethnically German, would also be a lie. Thus, it can NOT be denied, while keeping any shred of moral or ethical integrity, that in the 1910's, 20's and 30's the majority of the Communist Bolshevik leadership was comprised of persons of Jewish nationality. Regardless of their claims or feelings of persecution, what they in turn did only makes their lot the worse...since having been (and far from all cases) persecuted, they themselves turned out to be even worse persecutors. That these individuals were Jews, is beyond doubt. That they were guilty of mass murder, is beyond doubt. That all Jews bear their guilt is silly....so stop squirming and trying to protect this scum!

59 posted on 02/02/2003 7:28:39 PM PST by Stavka2 (Setting the record.)
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To: Stavka2
Look, I think we are at cross purposes here. The schlorrosis you describe can be applied to all of here who defend our own particular point of view. Whether it is Catholic, Jewish, Russian Orthodox, or other. Everyone dances that particular jig.

We are going around in circles here and repeating the same arguments. You obviously defend Solzhenitsyn's observation about Jews, and I think it was a gratuitus shot. If that is being hypersensitive, I plead guilty. We will have to agree to disagree on this.

60 posted on 02/02/2003 7:36:49 PM PST by Nachum
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