Chapter 24 of 200 Years Together: “Breaking Away from Bolshevism”

Kevin MacDonald

October 16, 2010

There’s an old saying that the winners write history. One of the most important consequences of Jews being a dominant intellectual and media elite is that they write their own history. Events like the devastation of the USS Liberty by Israel during the Six-Day War, the role of Jewish neocons in promoting the Iraq war, and the history of anti-Semitism generally (a major topic of Separation and Its Discontents) become arenas where unpleasant realities are simply expunged or are given apologetic treatments. On the other hand, Jewish victimization during World War II has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is massively promoted in the media and in the educational system to the point that it has become a prime weapon in the push for massive non-European immigration, multiculturalism, and advancing other Jewish causes (see here, p. 95). Naysayers are categorized as anti-Semites or self-hating Jews.  

A prime example of the ability of Jews to manipulate the historical record is expunging the critical Jewish role in Communism during the Bolshevik Revolution and in the ensuing decades — the main topic of Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 24 (“Breaking Away from Bolshevism”). Solzhenitsyn ascribes the fervor of the early Soviet government to the intensity of Jewish support. But, as noted in previous chapters, the very large imbalances in elite positions favoring Jews characteristic of the early decades diminished, especially after World War II, when Jews began to be specifically targeted, as during the anti-cosmopolite campaign of the early 1950s. Israel also exerted its primeval pull on Jews, especially after the Six-Day War when the USSR supported the Arabs. The result was an upsurge in overt Jewish nationalism, with synagogues filled and societies devoted to studying Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the Hebrew language.  

Jews turned against Communism but in doing so “almost none” of them ever acknowledged “their formerly active and cruel role in the triumph of communism in Russia.” “The whole educated society, the cultured circle, had genuinely failed to notice any Russian grievances in the 1920s and 1930s; they didn’t even assume that such could exist — yet they instantly recognized the Jewish grievances as soon as those emerged.” 

The level of self-deception is truly breathtaking. Acutely sensitive to any injustice toward Jews, they were completely tone deaf in comprehending the suffering of others or their role in causing it.  A Jewish author writes of the attraction of Jewish intellectuals to Marxism as motivated by idealistic visions of liberalism and humanism. Solzhenitsyn scoffs: “Liberalism and humanism? True, but only after Stalin’s death, while coming to their senses.” Even the concession that Jews were attracted to Marxism is lost on the great majority of Jewish writers who “find that under communism there was nothing but Jewish suffering! … Is it really possible to forget everything so completely?”  

One can only read in amazement the Jewish writer who claims "If ... one takes a bird's-eye view of the entire history of the Soviet period, then the latter appears as one gradual process of destruction of the Jews." Solzhenitsyn comments: “Note — the entire history! We investigated this in the previous chapters and saw that even without taking into account Jewish over-representation in the top Soviet circles, there had been a period of well-being for many Jews with mass migration to cities, open access to higher education and a blossoming of culture.” Solzhenitsyn is incredulous at the claim by a Jewish writer that “it is not possible to cultivate a loyal Soviet elite among them [the Jews]”:  

Oh my God! Was not this method working flawlessly for 30 years and only recently went awry? So where did all those glorious and famous names — whom we’ve seen in such numbers — came from? And why were their eyes kept so tightly shut that they couldn’t see the essence of Soviet rule for thirty to forty years? How is it that their eyes were opened only now? And what opened them? Well, it was mostly because of the fact that now that power had suddenly turned around and began pushing the Jews not only out of its ruling and administrative circles, but out of cultural and scientific establishments also.  

Solzhenitsyn quotes several Jewish writers who acknowledge the role of Jews in the most murderous regime in history, but they are few and far between. One such writer is particularly trenchant in his criticism of these Jews with no historical memory, writing of "our young Zionists who demonstrate so much contempt toward Russia, her rudeness and savagery, contrasting all this with [the worthiness of] the ancient Jewish nation. I saw it pretty clearly, that those who today sing hosanna to Jewry, glorifying it in its entirety (without the slightest sense of guilt or the slightest potential to look inside), [not long ago] beat their breasts in ecstasy: ‘Long live the great brotherhood of nations! Eternal Glory to the Father and Friend, the genius Comrade Stalin!’”  

Tellingly, Solzhenitsyn compares the ever-guilty and remorseful Germany with the behavior of Soviet Jews. Germany has made unending payments to Israel and to Holocaust victims, and the slightest advocacy of German sovereignty in regulating its borders and ensuring a future for ethnic Germans is met with outpourings of guilt about their past. On the other hand, there is a complete lack of guilt and remorse among Jews for their role in the destruction of Russia, and the vast majority of Jews are intensely committed an overtly ethnonationalist Israel. A Jew who did repent for the evil perpetrated by Jews against Russia “was bitterly ridiculed”—certainly not the fate of guilt-prone Germans. 

The result was that Jews, after they “zealously helped to exterminate [the Russian intelligentsia] during the first decade after the revolution” now became the vanguard of the new revolution against the USSR. Jews were responsible for publicizing Soviet injustices in the West, but the great majority of these Soviet dissidents never apologized for the behavior of their Jewish ancestors in the early decades of Soviet rule. Quite a few cared nothing about the fate of non-Jews. Their protests were solely about the treatment of Jews and the ability of Jews to emigrate from the USSR. 

As an exemplar of these tendencies, Solzhenitsyn devotes considerable space to Alexander Galich, a poet who was labeled by the arbiters of culture as "the most popular people's poet," the "bard of modern Russia." Solzhenitsyn’s account drips with disgust and scorn. Galich is representative of the Jews Solzhenitsyn discusses in his chapter on World War II: He avoided military service by claiming “poor health” but then "unexpectedly easily became the head of the literature section of the local Drama Theatre" — obviously suggesting that Galich benefited from his Jewish connections. He spent the war safely entertaining troops well behind the front lines.  

After the war, he smoothly morphed into a widely acclaimed screenwriter, comfortably spouting the “stupefying official Soviet lies” that were required for success in the media. (The parallels to the current recipe for media success in the West are painfully obvious.) But as Jews generally soured on the regime, Galich became an influential critic of the regime. His songs criticized current Soviet leadership, narrowly focusing on “their privileged way of life,” while generally ignoring the bloody early decades. As someone who suffered through his experience in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn is particularly outraged that Galich represented himself as having been a camp inmate; and "from the camp we were sent right to the front!," implying also that he served as a soldier at the front during the war.  

But even worse is Galich’s failure to apologize for his own past as a purveyor of Soviet lies: “He had never expressed a single word of his personal remorse, not a word of personal repentance, anywhere!” (emphasis in text). Galich’s Jewish identity and sense of Jewish victimization assumed center stage: "Our train leaves for Auschwitz today and daily." Galich the “folk poet” had nothing but hatred and contempt for the Russian people. In his songs, all the evildoers are Russians, often referred to with ethnic slurs. There is not a single heroic Russian soldier, worker, or intellectual, “not even a single decent [Russian] camp inmate (he assigned the role of the main camp inmate to himself).” On the other hand, all of his Jewish characters are “either humiliated, or suffering, or imprisoned and dying in a camp” (while guarded by Russians), despite the fact that Jews remained overrepresented in elite positions even after the post-WWII campaign for greater non-Jewish participation among the elite.  

What a short memory they have — not only Galich, but his whole audience who were sincerely, heartily taking in these sentimental lines! … They have sincerely and completely forgotten [the past]. Indeed, it is so difficult to remember bad things about yourself.  

Notice that Solzhenitsyn is saying that the Jews had “sincerely and completely forgotten” about the past. This is yet another example of Jewish self-deception in accord with their ethnic self-image. It goes without saying that behind this avalanche of self-deception is a towering ethnocentrism that biases Jewish self-perceptions—the point of Chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents. Jews steadfastly believe their own myths while delighting in skewering the myths of the peoples they live among. This is what makes Jewish issues fundamentally insoluble: With very few exceptions as noted by Solzhenitsyn (inevitably labeled “self-hating Jews”), there can never be common ground because Jewish self-perceptions are inevitably skewed by their ethnocentrism. They simply fail to see how their behavior as an elite, whether in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s or in the contemporary United States and throughout the West, could conflict with the legitimate interests of others.   

A recent example is neocon warrior Joshua Muravchik reviewing a book on the Jewish refusniks and therefore covering the same ground as Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 24:   

[It is ironic} that Communism, a monstrosity in whose birth a number of deracinated Jews played a shamefully large part, was eventually brought down by acts undertaken in disproportionate measure by re-racinated Jews: Israelis, Americans, and, above all, Soviet citizens. 

The proposal that the Jews responsible for the birth of Communism were “deracinated” stands as needing no defense or explanation. No need to explain Jewish ethnic networking at all the elite levels of Soviet society during the most horrific days of the Soviet regime—a point emphasized repeatedly by Solzhenitsyn in several chapters. No need to discuss the great mass of evidence that Jewish radicals comprised a very significant, mainstream Jewish subculture that retained a strong ethnic identity throughout the early decades of the 20^th century. (Solzhenitsyn has some excellent examples in Chapter 27, soon to be posted.) Muravchik is confident that his audience is quite prepared to believe that Jews were not really Jews when they served as Stalin’s willing executioners, but then became heroic Jews as they acted to bring down the Evil Empire. Meanwhile, as a proudly racinated Jew, Muravchik puts the interests of Israel first, for example, by writing propaganda pieces for Commentary aimed at denying that neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions are tailored to benefit Israel and that imputations to that effect amount to “anti-Semitism” (see my review of Muravchik’s role in neoconservatism here).  

So it goes. 

In conclusion, I can only agree wholeheartedly with Solzhenitsyn for the need to dispassionately think about Jewish issues, but without fear: 

We have to get used to talk about Jewish question not in a hush and fearfully, but clearly, articulately and firmly. We should do so not overflowing with passion, but sympathetically aware of both the unusual and difficult Jewish world history and centuries of our Russian history that are also full of significant suffering. Then the mutual prejudices, sometimes very wild, would disappear and calm reason would reign.  

The only problem with this is that Solzhenitsyn shows that the vast majority of Jews are simply incapable of dispassionate analysis that would in any way imply criticism of Jews. And that in turn implies that a real discussion is impossible.  

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly. He is professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

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