Russia and the Jews

I N T R O D U C T I O N
Nobel Prize Winner’s Writings Still Banned
BY UDO WALENDY
Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn
has proved to be without doubt
both a very important and industrious
writer. He was born on
December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk, Stavropol
Krai, Russia. While an artillery captain in the
Red Army, he was arrested in February 1945
in East Prussia because of an exchange of
letters that criticized Josef Stalin between the
lines and that was zealously read by political
monitors.
For 8 years, from 1945 through 1953, he
suffered through the work camps of the
gulag and then spent three more years in an
internal banishment region of Kazakhstan.
Afterward, he was a mathematics teacher.
Assured of government approval by
Nikita Khrushchev (the communist head of
state after Stalin) who had introduced a free-speech period or
“thaw,” he released in 1962 his fictionalized account One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first Soviet work of literature
about Stalin’s punishment camps. It was translated immediately
into numerous languages.
Then new attacks and persecution began. None of his important
novels after Ivan Denisovich was allowed to appear in
the Soviet Union: CancerWard (1968); The First Circle of Hell
(1968); The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes in most printed
editions, 1973-1978); and a cycle of novels called The Red
Wheel, consisting of August 1914 (1971), November 1916
(two volumes, 1984) and March 1917 (two volumes, 1989-
1990). A fourth tome in the cycle, April 1917, is not yet translated
into English.
He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but
did not dare travel to Oslo to receive it, fearing he would be
banned from Russia. That same year he was in fact excluded
from the Soviet Writers Federation (which readmitted him
only in 1989 under glasnost). He was expelled from the Soviet
Union in 1974 and lived in Vermont from 1976 to 1994.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Photo taken while in the gulag.
Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev rehabilitated
him in 1990 and restored his Russian
citizenship.
The present discussion is concerned with
the second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s twovolume
work. Together they are called Two
HundredYears Together. In romanized Russian,
this is Dvyesti lyet vmestye.
The first volume was Russian-Jewish
History 1795-1916 and ran to 512 pages,
published in 2001. In 2002 the second volume
appeared, a 600-page-long investigation
called The Jews in the Soviet Union.
His preceding books, written in the form
of novels, were often based on historical
facts and personal experiences, and all could
lay claim to correct and provable factuality
regarding the historical events they described.
As far as we know no one—apart
from communist dogmatists unable to toss
overboard their mendacious party dialectic—has dared attack
or refute him on his facts. He merits outstanding recognition
for this in view of the abundance of detail in his works. In his
book The Jews in the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
has once again opened up for us a multiplicity of Russian
sources that previously had been inaccessible or unevaluated
in German-speaking countries.
His Two Hundred Years Together series abandoned his
usual form of fiction in favor of scientific analysis. Possibly
this was also due to the controversial topic: Jewish power and
anti-Semitism. There is only one problem with this otherwise
excellent book, chapter nine, “At War with Germany.” Chapter
nine should also have received his usual comprehensive documentary
analysis. But here we cannot avoid the reproach, to
be detailed later, that the Nobel Prize-winning Solzhenitsyn,
whom we otherwise profoundly respect, copied for this chapter
exclusively from biased Jewish and Soviet sources, in fact
mostly from state historians, without feeling compelled to undertake
one single critical examination.
As an experienced analyst, he should have known that
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