Traditional Prejudices

The anti-Semitism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Cathy Young from the May 2004 issue

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This sweeping exoneration is puzzling. As an example of Solzhenitsyn's reverence for traditionalist Jews, Pipes quotes his assertion, "The preservation of the Jewish people for more than two thousand years in diaspora arouses amazement and respect." Yet he omits the not-so-flattering next lines: "However, if we take a closer look: in some periods...this unity was achieved by the oppressive methods of the kagals [Jewish self-governing bodies], and one no longer knows if these methods should be respected simply because they stemmed from religious tradition. At least, for us Russians, even a small dose of such isolationism is treated as a repulsive fault."

Even stranger is an essay in the November 2002 History Today. There John Klier, a historian at London's University College, describes the charges of anti-Semitism as "misguided." Then he writes that in his account of the pogroms of the early 20th century, Solzhenitsyn is far more concerned with exonerating the good name of the Russian people than he is with the suffering of the Jews, and that on occasion he accepts the czarist government's canards blaming the pogroms on provocations by the Jews themselves.

And that's not anti-Semitic? It's doubtful that an American writer who took a similar attitude toward the lynchings in the South would be absolved of the taint of racism.

How to explain this leniency? Perhaps it is simply too painful to consider that the great moral beacon of the communist days might be tainted with bigotry. But while the writer's role in Soviet-era history undoubtedly deserves respect, that does not require blindness to his flaws.

Solzhenitsyn's anti-communism, it is increasingly clear, was never a defense of individual freedom. It was a defense of a different kind of collectivism: ethnic, religious, and traditionalist. This is far from the only time that such a mind-set -- anti-secular, anti-modern, anti-individualist -- has been linked to prejudice against those who don't fit into the collective. r