Two Hundred Years Together
| Author | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
|---|---|
| Translator | (none) English |
| Country | Russia |
| Language | Russian |
|
Publication date
|
2002 |
| ISBN |
Two Hundred Years Together (Rus. Двести лет вместе, Dvesti let vmeste) is a two-volume historical essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was written as a comprehensive history of Jews in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and modern Russia between the years 1795 and 1995, especially with regard to government attitudes toward Jews.
Solzhenitsyn published this two-volume work on the history of Russian–Jewish relations in 2001 and 2002. The book stirred controversy, and many historians reported it as unreliable in factual data. Some historians classified it as antisemitic. The book was published in French and German in 2002–2003. A partial English translation is found in "The Solzhenitsyn Reader".
In the first volume, Solzhenitsyn discusses the history of Russians and the 100,000 Jews that had migrated to Russia between 1772 and the revolution of 1917. He asserts that the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire were not government-sponsored but spontaneous acts of violence, except for some government culpability in the Pale of Settlement. Solzhenitsyn says that life for Russian Jews was hard but no harder than life for Russian peasants. The second volume covers the post-revolution era up to 1970 when many Jews left Russia for Israel and other western countries. Solzhenitsyn says that the Jews who participated in Russian revolutions were effectively apostates splitting from the spirit of tradition. Solzhenitsyn emphatically denies that Jews were responsible for the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. At the end of chapter nine, Solzhenitsyn denounces "the superstitious faith in the historical potency of conspiracies" that leads some to blame the Russian revolutions on the Jews and to ignore the "Russian failings that determined our sad historical decline."
Solzhenitsyn criticizes the "scandalous" weakness and "unpardonable inaction" that prevented the Russian imperial state from adequately protecting the lives and property of its Jewish subjects. But he claims that the pogroms were in almost every case organized from "below" and not by the Russian state authorities. He criticizes the "vexing," "scandalous", and "distressing" restrictions on the civil liberties of Jewish subjects during the final decades of the Russian old regime. On that score, in chapter ten of the work he expresses his admiration for the efforts of Pyotr Stolypin (Prime Minister of Russia from 1906 until 1911) to eliminate all legal disabilities against Jews in Russia.
...
Wikipedia