Review: Two Hundred Years Together

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, review by Friedrich Braun.

I just finished reading the French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together (2003) on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772 in two volumes (still no English translation available… "are we powerful or what?").

It’s both a quick and fascinating read; among other things, we learn that not only the October 1917 Revolution (really a just a well-organized, well-carried out Jewish coup) was dominated by Jewish agitators (a documented fact) but so was the 1905 Revolution (something I didn’t know).

We also learn from the grand old man the awe-inspiring extent of the Jewish domination of the Soviet Union during its first two decades of existence, including its ruthless and murderous internal security system: Tcheka, OGPU, NKGB, and NKVD. A Russian in the hands of the Tcheka, etc. was almost certain to be in the hands of Jewish torturers and executioners.

The litany of Jewish crimes committed against the long-suffering Russians (and other Slavic peoples: Ukrainians and Belarussians) and coldly listed by the author is simply nauseating and one should approach both volumes on an empty stomach.

To this day there has been no acknowledgment on the part of international Jewry of Jews’ overwhelming support of the Bolshevik dictatorship during its first two decades. No asking for forgiveness. No reparations paid out to Russians. No chest-beating. No calls for repentance. No nothing…how un-Jewish that would be! Those few, rare Jewish voices who dared to speak out about the Jewish role in the establishment of the communist terror machine in Russia were inevitably greeted with hostility and enmity by other Jews and told to shut their “self-hating” mouths.

It must also be remembered that it was Russian Jewry that saved the Bolshevik “experiment” in the early days when the old order civil servants went on a general strike to protest Bolshevik methods and measures. When that happened, educated and sympathetic Russian Jews were able to step in and literally save the nascent Bolshevik administration.

Another interesting aspect brought up by the author concerns the so-called era of “National Bolshevism” (a real misnomer) allegedly inaugurated by Stalin. Solzhenitsyn points out that Stalin was as much hostile to Russian interests as rest of review & reader comments >>

Swamp Yankee weighs in over at IncogMan :

Kaganovich, the most powerful Jew in the Soviet Union, supervised the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, beginning in 1929. To break the spirit of the farmers, Ukraine was subjected to an artificial famine. Jewish NKVD (secret police) officals went from farm to farm, directing the Red Army’s confiscation of crops and livestock. None was left for the farmers. And in 1933 and 1934 seven to ten million Ukrainians died of starvation, while Kaganovich and his fellow Jews watched and gloated from the Kremlin.
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To sum it up, Lazar Kaganovich was a Jew raised in the Jewish tradition, a yeshiva boy taught to guide himself on the basis of doing always what is best for the Jews, and this precept actually is cited explicitly several times in the book. He attended his first Communist Party meeting in 1911, when he was 18, to hear the Jewish communist Trotsky give a speech in a synagogue in Kiev; that’s right: in a synagogue. He rose rapidly in the inner circle of the Communist Party, which contained many more Jews than Gentiles. His success was due primarily to his aggressiveness and his ruthlessness. In his communist activity he held back from nothing, no matter how brutal or bloody.
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When the Gentile communist Nikita Khruschev accused Kaganovich in 1957 at a Soviet Party Congress of having murdered 20 million Russians during his career, Kaganovich didn’t even deny it. He only accused Khruschev of being a murderer too. “Your hands are blood-stained too,” Kaganovich told him. Khruschev pointed out that the difference was that he, Khruschev, had merely followed Kaganovich’s orders, while it had been Kaganovich who had formulated the policies of mass murder and had given the orders for carrying out those policies.

It’s a fascinating book and if you really want to gain some insight into the Jewish mentality, into the way they justify themselves, into the way they view the non-Jewish world, you should read it for yourself. Kaganovich wants to boast about the power he once held, and at the same time he wants to evade responsibility for his crimes, and one can see this ambivalent attitude throughout the book.
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And we understand why the Germans back before the Second World War really wanted to get the Jews out of their country and off their backs. We understand why Stalin decided in 1953 that he would leave as his gift to the Russian people something that they would be eternally grateful for by getting rid of every Jew in the Soviet Union.

So, the question now is, what can we do to free ourselves from the Jews? What can we do to break their death-grip on our mass media of news and entertainment and on our political system? How can we bring about an end to their racket of using us to extort money from the rest of the world for them? more >>

Matthew Johnson, writing about two other of Solzhenitsyn's novels, writes about the spirit of the madness created by the Soviets :

Solzhenitsyn’s writings are not attacks, per se, on the USSR, but the absurdities of the system are merely an excuse for an attack on the Enlightenment and its open worship of Prometheus, the “light bearer,” that will permit the domination of nature in exchange for sacrifice, that is, the slavery and enserfment of labor, and of course, a huge grid of power that must come into existence in order to keep the wheels of industrial society running: a huge, regulatory state, foreign wars and colonies, maintenance of cheap fuel sources, the continuing battle between the state/employer complex and labor, and the continuing squeezing of labor for increased profit and market share. In addition, a Regime is formed (in the literal definition of the word), a System where private, state and quasi-private capital all create a authoritarian grid of thought and action that is put in the service of power. more >>

Thomas Allen at sums it up in Solzhenitsyn, The National Question, Russia’s Revolution, and The Jews.

So far the MSM commentariat has failed to find some obvious connections between globalization and a relatively recent social experiment—the Russian Revolution. Apparently, it’s easier to speculate about the nascent internationalism of Alexander the Great, the Knights Templar(mentioned by the Economist as the earliest multinational company) or Genghis Khan than it is to try to explain critical events of 90 years ago.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe imagined itself on the threshold of worldwide enlightenment. The growth of international socialism would end nationalism, it was widely believed. At most, “national questions” had become mere irritants to be swept aside on the road to the Great Enlightenment.

More recently, all this has been happening again. But this time the triumphalism is capitalist (at least Davos-style capitalism). Thus Wall Street Journal late editor Robert Bartley notoriously declared the nation-state dead. Bartley never explained, at least in public, what he thought would replace it. But I suspect he would have shared the Economist’s enthusiasm over the fact that General Electric "seems able to train … its recruits to think as GE people first and Indians, Chinese or Americans second."[Globalization’s Offspring, The Economist, April 7, 2007]

However, long before the editors of the Wall Street Journal and The Economist were acting as if the primacy of international commerce and consumerism had trumped the nation-state, the creators of the Soviet empire were insisting that all peoples would blend peaceably together into one. For the Bolsheviks too, there was no "national question" and no nation-state.

For instance, both Lenin and Stalin regarded Jews as a nation which existed on paper only. They predicted the 4,000 year-old people, along with all other nations, would soon become part of a new nationality-free human race. Trotsky, the supreme internationalist, ostentatiously disavowed his Jewish identity.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn addresses post-nationalism directly in his latest work 200 Years Together. (Volume 1, on pre-Revolutionary Russia, was published in Russia in 2001; Volume 2, covering the Revolution and the Soviet era, in 2002). In a remarkable cultural development, 200 Years Together has yet to find an English-language publisher, arguably because of its frank focus on Russian-Jewish relations, although the eminent Jewish scholar Richard Pipes, reviewing the first volume in the New Republic, concluded that Solzhenitsyn “absolves himself of the taint of anti-Semitism”.

Solzhenitsyn’s work, however, ranges far beyond Russians and Jews.

He observes that doubts about the validity of national identity tend to rise at various times when more >>

Das Buch auf Deutsch, Zweihundert Jahre zusammen. Die Juden in der Sowjetunion.