|
September/October – Volume XIV, Number 5
THE JEWS IN THE SOVIET UNION
BY JOHN TIFFANY
INTRODUCTION TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE . . . BRINGING HISTORY INTO ACCORD WITH THE FACTS IN THE TRADITION OF DR. HARRY ELMER BARNES
This edition of TBR is entirely devoted to one of the most important books on the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik era ever to be written: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Jews in the Soviet Union.
Together with part one, Russian Jewish History: 1795-1916, they comprise Solzhenitsyn’s massive—and suppressed—200 Years Together. We’re reviewing The Jews in the Soviet Union this issue because, as far as we know, this is the first and only full-length review of the book ever to appear in the English language.
Distinguished Revisionist historian Udo Walendy reviewed Solzhenitsyn’s The Jews in the Soviet Union in his magazine Historische Tatsachen (“Historical Facts”). Our English translation of that scholarly review—with many great photos added—comprises this September/October 2008 issue. We think it’s a blockbuster.
As Solzhenitsyn himself put it: “After 1917 life and people [in Russia] changed greatly. But literature produced a very poor reflection of these changes. The truth was suppressed and lies encouraged. Thus we arrived in the 1990s knowing next to nothing about this country. This explains the great number of surprises.”
The German magazine Der Spiegel asked the great writer:
Your recent two-volume work 200 Years Together was an attempt to overcome a taboo against discussing the common history of Russians and Jews. These two volumes have provoked mainly perplexity in the West. You say the Jews are the leading force of global capital and they are among the foremost destroyers of the bourgeoisie. Are we to conclude from your rich array of sources that the Jews carry more responsibility than others for the failed Soviet experiment?
Solzhenitsyn replied:
I avoid exactly that which your question implies: I do not call for any sort of scorekeeping or comparisons between the moral responsibility of one people or another; moreover, I completely exclude the notion of responsibility of one nation toward another. All I am calling for is self-reflection. You can get the answer to your question from the book itself: Every people must answer morally for all of its past—including that past which is shameful. Answer by what means? By attempting to comprehend: How could such a thing have been allowed? Where in all this is did we go wrong? And could it happen again?
It is in that spirit, specifically, that it would behoove the Jewish people to answer, both for the revolutionary cutthroats and the ranks willing to serve them. Not to answer before other peoples, but to oneself, to one’s conscience, and before God. Just as we Russians must answer—for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for those crazed revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors.
|
|
