Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is justly regarded as one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century, as well as the moral conscience of the Soviet Union for almost a half-century. With this book he has undertaken another great task, an effort to reconcile Russians and Jews. This is necessary, says Solzhenitsyn, because the two sides are guilty of wrongs against each other, committed over the course of their two hundred year long co-existence. The act of recounting this troubled relationship, he believes, will make reconciliation possible. The book is evidently designed to serve as a Russian version of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. To the historian, such a moral undertaking would seem better left to philosophers or theologians, but Solzhenitsyn assures the reader that he can accomplish this task while eschewing religion and mysticism, and concentrating on history, politics, culture, and daily existence [8].
The book itself constitutes a running narrative of Russian-Jewish relations from 1772 to the eve of 1917. The story is told in sequential fashion, although some chapters de-emphasise chronology in order to concentrate on specific themes, such as Jews in the revolutionary movement or the evolution of a Russian and Jewish consciousness (osoznanie).

SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

Dvesti let is old-fashioned history. The material is presented in chronicle form, providing narrative at the expense of analysis. At times it resembles Solzhenitsyn's historical cycle, The Red Wheel, where chunks of historical material are included in order to give the aura of authenticity. In Dvesti let, excerpts from Duma debates, official reports, and memoirs, often stand on their own, without interpretation, as though their meaning was self evident. Consequently, the book gives the impression of having been assembled, rather than written.
Solzhenitsyn's choice of sources gives the work a one-dimensional, imperial Russian perspective. His material roughly divides into four categories: official materials published by the tsarist regime; secondary literature from the late tsarist/early Soviet period; memoir literature, and encyclopedias. The reader will search in vain for any modern scholarship. Solzhenitsyn ignores the work of a whole generation of western scholars, such as Hans Rogger, Michael Stanislawski, Michael Aronson, Steven Zipperstein, Jonathan Frankel, Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, John Klier, Shaul Stampfer, Israel Bartal and Eli Lederhendler, all of whom published important books or articles between 1981 and 1995.^[1] Nor is there any awareness that a new generation of historians, writing in Russian, has begun to appear in the Former Soviet Union. This omission is significant and unfortunate, because modern studies deal with precisely the questions that intrigue Solzhenitsyn, and which he accuses “Jewish historians” of avoiding: Russian-Jewish relations, the origins and nature of Russian state policy towards the Jews, Jewish self-identity, and Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement, and, in particular, pogroms. Solzhenitsyn frames a debate which has long since moved on to other levels. The book is moribund, firmly anchored in the concerns of Russians in the last years of the imperial regime. Two additional criticisms apply to the manner in which Solzhenitsyn does use his materials: over-use and an absence of critical evaluation.
The greatest irony of the book is that Solzhenitsyn relies largely upon Jewish historians for his basic information, while at the same time questioning their objectivity [131]. (He raises no such qualifications when citing the polemical work of openly judeophobe authors, such as V. V. Shul'gin, whose typical claim was that, in the quarter century before the Revolution, “despite all the ‘restrictions’, the Jews… gained control of the soul of the Russian narod”[464].) Despite his criticisms of Jewish authors, so heavily does Solzhenitsyn rely on the work of one of them, Iu. I. Gessen, who wrote in the late tsarist and early Soviet period, that Gessen could almost be credited as the book's co-author. The first half of Dvesti let is often little more than an extended paraphrase of Gessen's extensive body of work. Solzhensityn's second most cited source comprises the historical entries contained in the pre-war Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, most of which were written by… Iulii Gessen.
Solzhenitsyn makes ample use of memoir literature without demonstrating any understanding of how historians must evaluate and employ such material. A much-used memoir, G. B. Sliozberg's Dela minuvshikh dnei, was written in exile, and published in Paris in the 1930s, long after the events in which the author was an active participant.^[2] Sliozberg had many axes to grind. While certainly well-informed, he was the closely tied to the de facto leaders of the Jewish community in the Russian Empire, the Barons Gintsburg; he was also a mill of rumors and gossip. Indeed, those same artfully embroidered stories that make Sliozberg such a source of colorful quotes should alert any experienced historian that his anecdotal evidence must be “handled with care”.
No less bizarre is the great confidence Solzhenitsyn places in the memoirs of the military chaplain Father Georgii Shavel'skii (whose open Judeophobia Solzhenitsyn balances by the claim that he too was of Jewish extraction)[482].^[3] Solzhenitsyn gives exaggerated credence to Father Georgii's comments, also written in exile, because he was “permanently resident at Headquarters” [481]. He is thus cited to suggest that there was a grain of truth to the universal claim among officers of the General Staff that the Jews were profiteering, cowardly and traitorous. It never occurs to Solzhenitsyn that this “expert”, dwelling well behind the lines, is merely repeating the prejudices of Staff Officers which were a commonplace in the military well before the outbreak of the war. They are amply documented in the archives and in the contemporary press, where the political Right was calling for the exclusion of Jews from military service, as part of a campaign to drive them completely out of Russian life.^[4] It is well-known how the military looked for treason to explain its own failures, and was predisposed to find it in the hapless Jewish population. Solzhenitsyn might have been expected instinctively to reject blanket accusations of this type against whole categories of people. The Jews were no more guilty for Russian failures in the First World War than Russian kulaks were to blame for the disasters of Soviet collectivization.
Equally curious is the credence that Solzhenitsyn gives to published official sources, without any appreciation of their context or the conditions under which they appeared. He assumes that the official report devoted to the pogrom of 1905 in Odessa must be objective, because it contained criticism of the local authorities, forgetting how the central authorities were keen to shift responsibility away from themselves. (Solzhenitsyn might have benefited from the extensive study of this issue in the work of Robert Weinberg.^[5]) A similar critique might be made of the senatorial report that examined the Belostok pogrom of 1906, which Solzhenitsyn fully accepts [370]. Solzhenitsyn must be aware that this was contested territory: the First Duma's insistence on investigating the pogrom, and the criticism it heaped on the local authorities, was one of the factors leading to the proroguing of the First Duma. However objective the authors of senatorial reports might be considered, their reports cannot stand without some critical evaluation. Solzhenitsyn's greatest failing as a historian is precisely his inability to evaluate sources critically, and to chose between rival versions of events. A typical example is the complete confidence he gives to official accounts of events in Gomel in 1903, which the police claimed was a “Jewish pogrom”, i.e., Jews attacking Christians [340-1]. Elemental contradictions in official reports are overlooked. At the beginning of a paragraph devoted to the Odessa pogrom we are told that only Jews, not the pogromshchiki, had firearms. The end of the same paragraph describes pogromshchiki shooting at the police [382]. We have a right to expect a more critical evaluation of self-serving police testimony from the man who cut through the fog of deceit and misinformation with which the police authorities in the Soviet Union surrounded themselves.
Apprentice historians are advised that encyclopedias should be used for a handy source of dates and basic information, and a general overview of a subject. But pity the poor undergraduate who submits an essay that uses encyclopedias as the principal source. It is thus bemusing to see Solzhenitsyn employ encyclopedias as the focus for a scholarly debate, as though they represented the peak of contemporary historical research. Solzhenitsyn is locked in an ambiguous relationship with his encyclopedias. He uses them as his basic source of information, while simultaneously condemning them for their erroneous interpretations.
As a consequence, on numerous occasions Dvesti let threatens to turn into a polemic conducted between Solzhenitsyn and his encyclopedias! Thus, the Evreiskaia entsiklopediia (SPb, 1906-1913), the Kratkaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Jerusalem, 1976- ) and the Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1994- ) serve simultaneous roles as sources and as critical targets. He is quite oblivious to their differing value. While the two modern works are useful sources of information for the Russian-language reader, they are very much transitional works that have yet to reflect the important gains of recent scholarship in the field. Neither of them, for example, possesses the scope or depth of their pre-war predecessor, the Evreiskaia entsiklopediia. Like all encyclopedias, they are reference tools, sacrificing detail and diversity for conciseness. Solzhenitsyn's method of operation is to discover inconsistencies and disagreements between two encyclopedia accounts, and then to give them a bitter dressing down, like an angry teacher catching naughty schoolboys cheating in class.
If Solzhenitsyn had wanted a worthy adversary to debate, he could easily have chosen the grand old man of Russian-Jewish historiography, Shimon Dubnow [Dubnov], whose monumental History of the Jews, as well as his voluminous studies of Russian Jewry, are all readily available in Russian.^[6] This would have been a fair fight, for Dubnow had many critical things to say about the Russian government, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Solzhenitsyn's beloved Russian people. For Dubnow, the Russians were ignorant, backward, intolerant, and fanatical. Despite this criticism, there is a striking symmetry here, for Dubnow displayed the same love-hate relationship with the Russians that Solzhenitsyn apparently conducts with the Jews. Dubnow, the poor Jewish boy from the shtetl of Mstistlav, consciously transformed himself into a typical Russian intelligent, but substituted a love for the Jewish masses in place of the intelligent's usual enthusiasm the Russian narod. Just as the Jew Dubnow turned into a Russian, so the Soviets, following the dictum that “all dissidents must be Jews”, tried to transform Solzhenitsyn into a Son of Israel (It will suffice to remember the polemical attacks that slyly suggested that the author's true name was “Solzhenitser”).

RETRO-HISTORY

Since Dvesti let is constructed from outdated secondary sources and ignores contemporary historiography, Solzhenitsyn can only recreate the debates on the Jewish Question that were conducted by imperial statesmen and publicists at the fin-de-siecle. The underlying assumptions of the debate were that the Jews were religious fanatics, separated from non-Jews by the arrogance of a self-styled “chosen people”. They particularly scorned their peasant neighbors, and felt no compunction at “exploiting” them.^[7] It is strange to see, in a modern work of history, assumptions that are redolent of the “moral economy” of the Middle Ages, with its scorn for the mundane concerns of profit and gain. Solzhenitsyn, like the tsars, fails to acknowledge the role which Jews played in the economic development of the empire. If the impact of the Jews was so harmful, one might ask, why did both Cossacks in Ukraine and burghers in Riga petition against the intolerant Empress Elizaveta Petrovna's decision to expel all Jews from her realm in 1742?^[8] Why did even notorious Judeophobes like Ivan Aksakov concede that Jews were a major positive force behind the system of Ukrainian fairs?^[9] Solzhenitsyn quotes the universal comment of all observers, ill and well-disposed to the Jews, was that “they gather all trade and commerce into their hands” [118]. He, like the people he cites, never explains who would have fulfilled this role if the Jews had been driven from it, especially when the peasantry remained enserfed and immobile.
The principles of modern economics remind us that a national economy is not a “zero-sum game”, where the wealth of one group can come only at the expense of another. Quite the contrary, Jewish economic achievements benefited the country as a whole. (There were good reasons for the consistent opposition of the Ministry of Finance to proposed restrictions on the Jews.) Jews benefited the local economy as artisans and traders; they served the regional economy as participants in fairs; they developed the national economy in areas such as beet-sugar production, railroad contracting, and the development of a national banking system (all invisible in Solzhenitsyn's account).^[10]
On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn displays an inordinate interest in the quixotic effort of the Russian government to make farmers out of the Jews through agricultural colonization. Just what the Russian Empire needed – several million additional peasants! Yet Solzhenitsyn devotes many pages to these insignificant projects, although his account is little more than a paraphrase of the work of V. N. Nikitin (a converted Jew, by the way) [107-115; 152-8].
While Solzhenitsyn assumes the fundamental decency of the Russian rural village, he is less willing to compliment the shtetl, the Jewish village, and the communal structures, the kahal (heb. kehillah) which governed it. Rather, he sees the Jewish community purely in the terms of its critics, both pre- and post-revolutionary. Thus, the kahal was a vehicle for the domination of the poor by the rich within the community, and a vehicle through which all Jews might exploit the Christian peasantry [34-5, 48, 90, 126]. At the same time, it served to keep the Jews isolated and apart from the rest of the “Russian” population. Solzhenitsyn is thus at one with Soviet critics of the kahal (many of them Jews), who viewed the kahal purely in the context of class struggle.
Without some basic understanding of the cultural life of the Jews, one cannot understand the significance of the kahal. It had all the virtues and shortcomings of any form of traditional life, including that of Solzhenitsyn's much-admired peasant obshchina. There is also a cultural contrast to be made: while the peasant obshchina served a creative and preservative role in the development of a largely oral peasant culture, the Jewish kahal provided the social context for the continuing development of a rich and sophisticated literate culture. The passion of Jews for traditional learning encouraged the community to support a vast network of educational institutions, ranging from the traditional primary school, the heder, to the advanced institutions of talmudic scholarship, the yeshivot. These institutions should be at least mentioned, if not examined in some detail. After all, they served not only to defend the traditional Jewish way of life from the in-roads of modernization, but also imparted to the Jews skills, such as a respect for learning and literacy, which would equip them for entry into a modern culture. This major division between the Jewish and Russian worlds surely merits some discussion in what purports to be a comparative study.

NASHI/VASHI

Solzhenitsyn's survey envisions a struggle that is entirely dualistic, fought only between us (Russians) and them (Jews). There is not the slightest hint here that other nationalities inhabited the Empire, or that their relations with the Jews might be worth considering, if only for comparative purposes. The only significant exception is found in Solzhenitsyn's discussion of the pogroms of 1881-2, when he notes in passing that it was the Ukrainian peasants, not the Russians, who carried out the violence [207]. The Ukrainian reference is suggestive: it reminds us that Solzhenitsyn might with profit have examined the fraught relationship between the emergent Ukrainian national movement and the Jews, if only to consider the Ukrainophiles' hostility towards the Jews in their role as carriers of russification. The case of Polish-Jewish relations, which went through a series of striking ups and downs between 1861 and 1914, would also have provided a useful comparative case, not least through consideration of the Polish complaint that russified “Litvaks” – Jews from Lithuania – were bringing unwanted Russian culture into the Kingdom of Poland. (Only in passing does Solzhenitsyn quote a Polish patriot that “the best of the Jews are our enemies. . . . carrying the hostile features of Russian culture” [176]. By making the other national minorities disappear, Solzhenitsyn escapes the need to consider the extent to which, in the eyes of other ethnic groups, Jews were viewed as enemies exactly because they were perceived as allies of the Russians, or to explain this phenomenon.
Solzhenitsyn also ignores the fact that, throughout the Empire, excluding Poland, despite the complaints of Polish nationalists, Jews became ardent proponents of Russian culture, and made significant contributions to it. He chooses to ignore their contributions, as well as the manner in which they were often repaid. Isaac Levitan, whose painting “Eternal Rest” serves for many as the quintessential evocation of rural, Orthodox Russia, had to flee St. Petersburg because of his lack of a pravozhitelstvo. The sculptor Mark Antokolskii, whose works so artfully evoked Peter the Great, Nestor the Chronicler, and even Ivan the Terrible, was virtually hounded out of the Empire – despised at home, a laureate abroad. Nor should we forget the sculpture which may serve as the ultimate symbol of the Jewish desire to be accepted as “Russian”: Antokolskii's much maligned depiction of Christ as a Jew, in the ritual garment, or talit, and side-locks. When Solzhenitsyn does evoke a Jewish spokesman, he makes eccentric choices, such as that of the entirely unrepresentative Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, known even to his admiring biographer as “The Lone Wolf”. The young Jabotinsky was probably as inappropriate a choice for a representative spokesman for Russian Jewry as it was possible to select.^[11]
Depicting Jews as a unified whole, distinct from and in opposition to Russians [458], Solzhenitsyn sees the rivalry as one where the success of one, usually the Jews, must come at the expense of the other. Thus, discrimination against Jews, such as quotas in education and the professions, or forced resettlement from the countryside, is justified for the opportunities it gave to Russians. (One would think that, for every Jew denied a gimnazium or university place, the son of a Russian peasant was admitted.) This was exactly the misguided ideology of nashi/vashi that so bedeviled the ethnic politics of the Old Regime. We might also contrast this policy failure with the example of the Petrine and Catherinian Empires, that were pleased to employ able servitors irrespective of origin, talent being the decisive criterion.
In any case, for Solzhenitsyn the suffering of Jews never approached that of the peasantry [284]. Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn is convinced that all restrictions laid upon the Jews were temporary, un-enforced, or easily and totally evaded [285]. Following this approach, Solzhenitsyn devotes less than two pages to an event that Jewish historiography rates among the most important in Russian-Jewish history: the imposition of personal military service upon the Jews in 1827. Solzhenitsyn would argue – as the Russian government did at the time – that this was simple justice that the Jews should bare the same burdens as other subjects. He does not note the efforts of the authorities to destroy the recruits' culture, including their religion. Even if the picture of the kidnap of Jewish youths and their forcible conversion to Russian Orthodoxy contained in Jewish historical sources is exaggerated, it should at least be discussed. To fail to do so resembles a history of the Russian peasantry that treats serfdom in two pages.
The entire question of an “index of suffering” is worth raising, because a principal theme in the debates of Russian historians revolves around the extent to which the economic situation of the countryside was improving in the years before the Great War. [This is part of that ancient debate: “Was the Russian Revolution necessary?”] Historians divide on the situation of the peasantry, but it is impossible to find any historian, past or present, who argues that the economic situation of the Jews was improving. The economic deterioration of the shtetl, universally remarked upon, was the motive force for the phenomenon of mass Jewish migration out of the Empire. Ironically, recognition of this reality would have bolstered Solzhenitsyn's contention that the impact of the pogroms on Russian Jewry has been much exaggerated.
It never occurs to Solzhenitsyn (as it did to many a Russian Minister of Finance) that modernization and development serve the interests of the state whoever serves as their agents. The case of the Jews in XIX^[12] century Germany comes to mind as a suitable comparison, to say nothing of the legions of East European Jews who made contributions to world culture, to the advantage, not of Mother Russia, but of those stepmother nations that gave them refuge. It is worth noting that for the first generation of immigrants, their new counties were not the legendary “goldene medina” (golden land) as the United States was called. The first immigrants were burdened with poverty and a life of toil and drudgery in sweatshops and in factories hardly worse than those that they left behind. Why then did they become such loyal citizens? Their general patriotism is best explained by the absence of legal systems in their new homelands that subjected them to sustained discrimination and restrictions, as was the case in Russia.
But then Solzhenitsyn is unconcerned with the economic role of the Jews in tsarist Russia, except when it can be criticized. He echoes the XIX^[13] century sources that the Jews “gather all trades and commerce into their hands”, but never asks why this should be or ponders its wider implications. He condemns the alleged profiteering of Jewish provisioners to the Russian army in wartime, such as the notorious firm of Gorovits, Greger and Kagan [152]. Yet he never queries why, as late as 1877-8, Jewish middlemen were still required to help Russia fight her wars. Nor does he explore why similar complaints were not heard in earlier periods, although the archives are filled with material relating to the economic contacts of the Russian military and Jewish provisioners. (Might it be suggested that Jews were again be asked to take the blame for the failures of the Russian military?)^[14] It is no surprise, then, that Solzhenitsyn has nothing to say about the role of Jews in the development of the national economy, to the humble market trader, to the railway and banking magnates, such as the Poliakovs and Gintsburgs, to say nothing of those who, like the Brodskiis in Ukraine, helped to develop whole new areas of the economy, such as sugar beets (thus putting cheap sugar on the peasant table).

POGROMS^[15]

When Dvesti let first appeared, Solzhenitsyn's treatment of the pogroms of 1881-2 in the Ukraine, in Kishinev and Gomel (1903), and in Belostok (1906) attracted the most attention from reviewers. Some critics, who should have known better, even fixed the label of “antisemitic” to his arguments. The irony is that Solzhenitsyn is, in many respects, correct in his analysis of the pogroms, but for the wrong reasons: Solzhenitsyn relies on his instincts rather than on a factual basis, while his critics advance a historical version of the pogroms that has been under sustained challenge by contemporary scholars for some time. This negative critical response to Solzhenitsyn's interpretation may be motivated by his rather unsympathetic attitude to the suffering of the Jews. Solzhenitsyn seems more concerned by the use of the pogroms by foreign propagandists to discredit Russia and blacken the name of her people than the impact they had upon the Jews .
In any event, Solzhenitsyn is absolutely correct in his claim that the number of pogrom victims – and the atrocities visited upon them – were wildly exaggerated. Indeed, the scale and brutality of the pogroms has remained one of the foundation myths of East European Jewish history, first encountered in accounts of the time, then canonized by the historical account of Dubnow, and continually reoccurring in the secondary literature. The family legends of many American and European Jews of East European origin insist that it was pogroms that led their ancestors to seek refuge in the West, even though periods of peak out-migration did not always correspond to periods of maximum pogrom activity. Rather than the hundreds of murders and rapes enumerated in the secondary literature for 1881-2, there were no more than 25 Jewish fatalities. The Kishinev pogrom claimed just over 60 victims. (It is a sad testimony to the murderous scale of the late, unlamented XX^[16] century, that we can say “only” 67 casualties occurred. At the time this sufficed to create an international scandal and to blacken the tsarist regime to an extent from which it never recovered in Jewish eyes.) Solzhenitsyn is sharply critical of the propagandistic use made of the pogroms to “blacken the name of the whole Russian people”, not stopping to consider that, had there been no pogroms, there would have been no atrocity propaganda to lay at the government's door.
The crude responses of the Russian government to the pogroms – a subject that Solzhenitsyn does not explore – made it much easier to claim that the state itself was to blame for the pogroms, either through direct instigation, passive toleration, or dereliction of duty. Consider the official response: in 1881-2, N. P. Ignatiev, the Minister of Internal Affairs, fixed the blame on the Jews themselves for their exploitation of the peasantry; in 1903 the government took no steps against those, like P. A. Krushevan, who had been consciously poisoning Jewish-Christian relations in Kishinev; in 1905 the authorities sought to blame the revolution on the Jews and to see the pogroms as some sort of patriotic manifestation (a line of thought that Solzhenitsyn is inclined to follow).
Solzhenitsyn, like the imperial Russian government, searches for an explanation for the pogroms that does not reflect too badly on the narod. While Solzhenitsyn does not go quite so far along the path of blaming the victims as did the imperial regime, he does discover a set of elevated popular motives amidst the blood, rapine and looted alcohol. The dignity and sensibility of the narod, he argues, were offended by Jewish arrogance and disdain for those things that the peasant and urban mob found most dear – the imperial throne and the “Little Father” who sat upon it. Just how this explains the pogroms of 1881-2 is unclear, or why popular violence at any time was apt to turn into attacks on Jews. Not a few contemporaries, including highly placed members of the government, argued that discriminatory legislation placed the Jews outside the law, and made them an inviting target for violence. As I. Michael Aronson has shown, there was a serious debate within the corridors of power in 1881-2 over the possibility of “emancipating the Jews” (i.e., abolishing the Pale of Settlement) as a tool to reducing pogrom violence.^[17] For the later period, Solzhenitsyn places the blame on the Jewish revolutionaries, portraying the Gomel pogrom of 1903 as a “Jewish pogrom against Christians”, and the Belostok pogrom as an “anarchist takeover of the city”. This “analysis” is little more than the repetition of excuses advanced by the imperial government to excuse its own failings. These claims, in turn, were “confirmed” by boastful revolutionaries, eager to demonstrate their prowess. The anti-Jewish pogroms represent a phenomenon in modern Russian history that is urgently in need of reconsideration and re-analysis. In Dvesti let, Solzhenitsyn only re-cycles old Russian myths as a means of countering old Jewish myths.

SOLUTIONS?

By depicting a Russia that is inhabited only by Russians and Jews, Solzhenitsyn fails to engage one of the central problems of pre-revolutionary Russia, that of the nationalities, of which the Jewish Question was only one part. A fundamental failure of the tsarist regime was to ignore the task of creating a modern, multi-ethnic state, in whatever imperial garb it might be cloaked. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary ultimately failed in this grandiose task, but at least an effort was made. In his search for scapegoats, Solzhenitsyn would be well-advised to look to the pre-war Russian nationalists whom he often cites so favorably. At their door must rest the consequences of policies towards the Empire's national minorities which turned so many of them into enemies. Russia, after all, was not always seen by its peoples as the “prison-house of nations”.
In the Habsburg lands, in contrast, political activists and theoreticians were actively engaged in a search for a solution to the growing nationalities problem. They debated such solutions as Trialism, as well as systems of personal and national autonomy, as a way of satisfying the demands of the various nationalities. The equivalent debate in the Tsarist Empire never took place, not even a core debate on the essential issue of whether the Empire should be “Russkaia” or “Rossiiskaia”. In the absence of debate, “Russkii” won by default, largely as a poisoned legacy of the struggle with the Poles.^[18] The regime's resultant russo-centric obsessiveness succeeded in alienating almost all the non-Russian minorities, not just the Jews. Tsarist policies succeeded in making Finns into terrorists, and in alienating the Armenians, who, as Orthodox Christians, were Russia's natural allies against the Ottoman Turks. Poland remains the extreme example. In contrast to the policies of the Habsburg Monarchy in Galicia, the tsarist regime was never able to devise a scheme in the Kongresowka that went much beyond de facto military occupation – with disastrous consequences for Russia's national security in 1854, 1903 and 1914.
The failure of the Russian state to win over the Jews should be seen within the context of this greater, overall failure to develop a multi-ethnic state. A profitable comparison might again be made with Germany and Austria, where the Jews, both secular and religious, were among the most loyal adherents of the throne, almost obsessively “Kaisertreu”. Russian policies, in contrast, created from a passive, loyal, quietist minority, some of the most alienated, embittered, and fanatical enemies of the regime. Even so, it is worth remembering that the vast majority of Russian Jews remained politically apathetic, heeding the advice of prominent rabbis to be “lower than the grass and quieter than the water”. As these same rabbis were keen to point out, it was the assimilated, anti-religious Jews who became the worst enemies of the regime.
Solzhenitsyn never comes to grips with these questions of imperial organization. Indeed, he has only scorn for one of the proposed solutions to the national question in Russia, national autonomy, which he discusses in the context of Jewish political aspirations. For Solzhenitsyn, this is just another example of Jewish privilege and special pleading, using the slogan of “equal rights” (ravnopravie) to claim greater rights than the “native” Russian population [355]. (This is an eerie echo of the reaction of tsarist statesmen at the end of the century, when confronted with call for an extension of the civil rights of Jews. Invariably, such policies were seen as “inappropriate” (neudobno).

ASSIMILATION

Was there a solution to the Jewish Question in Tsarist Russia, or were the Russians and the Jews fated always to be rivals and enemies? If Solzhenitsyn's book is worth writing, then this question is worth answering. In a confused way, assimilation is held up as the preferred solution to the Jewish Question, at least by implication.
The term “assimilation” is used repeatedly by Solzhenitsyn, without any recognition of the contentious nature of the term, or the enormous literature produced by social scientists on the subject. In Solzhenitsyn's account, “assimilation” is something which the Russian government offered to the Jews, and which they repeatedly rejected. It came in different forms, such as the agricultural colonization projects initiated by Alexander I and the state Jewish school system created by Nicholas I. When he does recognize episodes of successful assimilation, Solzhenitsyn laments that it of the wrong type: Jews assimilated, not with the narod, but with the small group of alienated Russian intelligenty [172-3]. Сonsequently, assimilated Jews became either revolutionaries or liberals, and participated in the destructive influence of both on the Russian state. Moreover, trying to have it both ways, Solzhenitsyn records, without demur, right-wing complaints that Jewish assimilation was never successful or complete because assimilated Jews retained features of Jewish particularism [454-5].
Solzhenitsyn devotes ample space to Jewish revolutionaries, and no doubt more will come when the second volume moves on to 1917 and the Soviet period. A special target in this volume is the liberal movement in Russia. Given the presence of so many acculturated Jews in the liberal professions, in addition to the emergent Jewish bourgeoisie, it is not surprising that many Jews were attracted to the liberal movement, with its promise of the rule of law and moderate political change. What Solzhenitsyn finds difficult to forgive is the extent to which the Jewish Question became entangled in liberal politics in the twentieth century. In their efforts to discredit and bring down the autocracy, liberals seized on the government's mistreatment of the Jews and converted what might be called Anti-antisemitism into an effective political weapon [318, 423, 460]. These “knights of freedom” [423], who dominated the professions [414] and who imbued the periodical press with its worst features [426-30], were determined to undermine the tsarist autocracy, and used the Jewish policies of Tsarism as a device to discredit the regime at home.
They found additional recruits to this task abroad, in the shape of international Jewish financiers, such as the American Jewish banker, Jacob Schiff. Schiff made no secret of his hostility to Russia, and provided valuable financial assistance to Japan in the course of the Russo-Japanese War [488-9]. (So did many Polish nationalist leaders, but that is another story.) Schiff openly stated his motives: the Jew-hating autocracy must be punished. Solzhenitsyn criticizes this stance, but never explains why international financiers had any obligation to support Russia's imperial adventures, or provide help in a war which symbolized all Russia's weaknesses and faults. Russia's leaders might better have learned the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War, beyond blaming it on Jewish finance. And Schiff notwithstanding, many Russian Jewish soldiers laid down their life for a Russian state which treated them as second class citizens.
Not only historians will find this book a disappointment. Admirers of Solzhenitsyn's literary style will find few passages that carry the mark of his customary literary brilliance, in large part because so much of the book is a paraphrase of other authors. Solzhenitsyn's voice appears only rarely, such as his musings on the ironies of history – in other words, when he turns from history to metaphysics [180, 360].
The ancient Greeks, when they sought to explain a stylistic lapse in the works of their greatest authors, noted sagely that “even Homer nods”. So is the case here. Solzhenitsyn remains a great and courageous author. It is thus a matter of regret that this book, filled with good intentions, will add nothing to his reputation. It serves rather as a reminder that Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for literature, not for history.