SUMMARY:

Slezkine’s book is a breakthrough. Borrowing from and then rejecting Nietzsche’s paradigm of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Slezkine posits the opposition between the Mercurial, meaning mobile, cosmopolitan, modern, and the Apollonian, meaning land-bound, aristocratic or peasant, and anti-modern. Jews exemplify the mercurial. Whereas Marx animates classes and ignores ethnicities, Slezkine animates ethnicities and ignores classes. Slezkine avoids dealing with the question of how to account for a classical bourgeoisie (Tier Йtat) that shared the same ethnic background as their Apollonian counterparts. The compelling center of his argument, however, is the attribution of modernity to Jews and the suggestion that those who have murdered Jews, from the Russian pogroms to the Holocaust, have been struggling to stop modernity. Essentializing the mercurial and modernity, Slezkine gives them a taste and smell that can be loved or hated. Modernity can be destroyed in its personification, the Jew. In the 21st century, modernity becomes an empire and vice versa, but was this true in the “Jewish” 20th century? Slezkine’s argues that the fact that Jews equal modernity is exemplified by their overrepresentation in the Bolshevik regime from 1917-1949. But were Bolsheviks modern? Slezkine takes the positive answer for granted. Taking into account the Soviet’s actual resistance to modernity, Jewish participation in Stalinist Russia (as well as in similar affairs such as the movement of “the fellow travelers” in the U.S.) does not confirm but rather undermines Slezkine’s central argument.
Slezkine redefines the history of the Jews in the 20th century as the history of three emigrations from the Pale: to America, to Israel, and to Russia’s cities. The fourth group was annihilated in the Holocaust. The concept of Russian Jews being immigrants in the same way as American or Israeli Jews transforms the conventional conception and self-conception of Russian Jews as local residents. With this new construction, Slezkine has irreversibly altered our understanding of the Diaspora.
In Slezkine’s well-grounded emphasis upon the overrepresentation of Jews in the Russian revolution, he provokes the unpleasant question of historical responsibility for its terror. Jews demand an acknowledgement of German responsibility for the Holocaust; can they avoid a similar debate in respect to their role in the Revolution? Ethnic diversity makes the issue of Soviet guilt more complex than the issue of the German guilt. It does not make this issue irresolvable or undebatable. Slezkine avoids these questions. He asserts that in the absence of a divine judge, collective guilt is not subject to analysis. But in secular culture, collective guilt is embodied in the work of memory. Slezkine’s work is actually written in this genre of collective (in this case, ethnic) memory. Rather than writing another book on the role of Jews in modern history, Slezkine has launched a pioneering contribution to the debate on Jewish responsibility. Such a book, for the Jew and non-Jew alike, would define the features of the post-revolutionary century. Unfortunately, Slezkine did not fully realize his own message. However, what he has done is a remarkable advance against the forces of hypocrisy and oblivion.