Spencer J. Quinn’s “Solzhenitsyn and the Right”

Solzhenitsyn and the Right
Spencer J. Quinn
Antelope Hill Publishing, 2021

Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right summarizes a large portion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s voluminous body of work, but its focus isn’t entirely on Solzhenitsyn. It is replete with parallels between pre- and post-revolutionary Russia/Soviet Union and the present situation in the West.

Fundamentally, Solzhenitsyn was a Russian patriot, and certainly not in a civic nationalist sense:

In his memoirs, he refers to Russians as his people and Russia as his country, and never does the fate of either escape his concern. He identified with the Russian people and so he bled when they bled, cried when they cried, and cheered when they cheered. He also longed for the Russian soil when he was away from it. Religion, tradition, and patriotism bound him to his people, and his people to each other, as in any enduring civilization. … For Solzhenitsyn, nationalism was more about blood than what it says in one’s passport. (3, 5)

Not surprisingly given such attitudes, he was highly critical of the West where he was exiled for almost 15 years, repeatedly “predicting the West’s downfall” because of its individualism, Enlightenment values, and lack of religious fervor. (4) And, as Quinn notes, he is proving to be right as a result of the immigration tsunami that has transformed Western societies into battlegrounds of conflicting and incompatible peoples and cultures, and where the native European-derived peoples are routinely vilified by elites in the media, the university, major corporations, and the political class in the societies they created. Of these, Solzhenitsyn identified the media as the most influential: it “distorts and embellishes its reportage to be as sensationalist as possible in order to ‘miseducate’ public opinion and garner profits and influence.” (17) In particular, the media appeals to and encourages weakness, whether in the food we eat (often resulting in obesity and its attendant diseases like diabetes), how we spend our leisure, how important we regard material wealth, or the value one places on conforming to the media’s moral imperative to admit and care for an unending stream of migrants who will eventually displace the peoples of the West. As always the demise of Western societies is presented as a moral issue, with payment to the descendants of colonial peoples and slaves quite possibly requiring the forfeit “of everything it owns.” (21)

Quinn notes the parallel between Soviet communism and the contemporary West:

While for Solzhenitsyn this Evil took the form of Communist and totalitarian governments which for the most part existed outside the West, today it appears as the equally totalitarian anti-white Left which lurks among us and has laid claim to our universities, our media, our corporations, and nearly all of our other institutions. It is this Left which has imported its shock troops from the Third World, and it is this Left which the West’s ‘conservative’ leadership has continually bowed down to and appeased. (22)

The composition of Western elites matters, and in particular the media elites. Fundamentally, they hate us. And, although Jews, with their long list of (imagined and real) historical grudges, are highly overrepresented in all areas of Western elites, they are by far most overrepresented as owners and creators in the media.

Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Gulag and survived assassination attempts by the KGB. Quinn notes that even this sort of Soviet oppression is more extreme than what we see in the West now, there are certainly the beginning signs of similar repression—travel restrictions, bank account and credit card suspensions for dissidents, banning and shadow banning on social media, double standards of justice in which the legal system throws the book at rightists and typically refuses to even investigate or indict leftists—as exemplified by the consequences of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the recent January 6 protest. There is no reason at all to suppose that the West couldn’t end up being at least as oppressive as the USSR. Powerful interests are seeking just that. “If the Far Left ever succeeds in gaining control over a major government (as it did in Russia in 1917), then the Dissident Right can expect oppression similar to what Solzhenitsyn and other figures faced in the Soviet Union.” (11)

Jewish Issues

Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia from 1906–1911, was assassinated in 1911 by a Jewish radical, Mordecai Bogrov, at a time when such radicalism was common among Jews. Jews hated Stolypin because, as Solzhenitsyn described it, “he boosted Russian interests too blatantly and too insistently—the Russianness of the Duma as a representative body, the Russianness of the state.” (26; italics in text) Solzhenitsyn believed Stolypin’s assassination was catastrophic because it unleashed “the first eddies in a swirl of nihilism, war, and death which would soon consume Europe.” (27) Quinn notes that Solzhenitsyn “dared to depict Bogrov in a way resembling Jewish stereotypes” (30)—a lying, two-faced manipulator, physically weak and neurotic but highly intelligent. “There was nothing the Russians could do, other than cede power to the Jews, that would satisfy him” (31). And indeed, he was motivated by his Jewish identity and sense of Jewish interests: “I was fighting for the benefit of the Jewish people.”  (34)

Parallels to the Present

After describing Lenin’s psychopathic personality (e.g., his duplicity and his “enmity toward everything traditional, natural and morally wholesome,” (43) Quinn notes that “the left has not changed much since Lenin’s day, merely exchanging class for race in the twenty-first century. The same bunch that called for the civil rights of non-Whites is now calling for the open oppression of whites. Just as with Lenin, what the Left says it wants and what it truly wants are two different things. … A stroll through Twitter or anti-white Hollywood in the 2020s will show quite clearly that the left’s violent fantasies against their perceived enemies haven’t gone away and aren’t going anywhere.” (44)

The February Revolution which led to the Provisional Government resulted from well-organized, well-funded activists, just as we see today in the wake of George Floyd’s death; “they are also engaging in the kind of violence, ruthless intimidation, and hateful rhetoric that Solzhenitsyn documents in March 1917.” As today, rightists in 1917 trusted the leftists, who were clearly attempting to end the monarchy, to be “acting in good faith when they clearly weren’t.” And as today, the left is full of promises for a utopian future free of strife and oppression if only power is ceded to them. Solzhenitsyn: “Tranquility would only come to Russia when the present government system had been ripped out at the root.” (54; italics in text) Solzhenitsyn comments on the police being intimidated and rendered powerless, and Quinn draws the contemporary parallel: “During America’s riots in the summer of 2020, how many times did the police stand down or kneel to the rioters? How many times did we see the police actively take the side of the rioters, or refuse to protect innocent people from them?” (57) As now, the media was on the side of the rioters, not only presenting fake news, e.g., on police violence against rioters, but also, as Solzhenitsyn notes, intimidating those with power from enforcing the law: “Columns in the liberal newspapers alone made the governors pale and attempt to justify their measures. … They could not kill their own people” (57)—quite unlike the Bolsheviks who had no compunctions about mass murder against their perceived enemies.

As Quinn notes, the main message of March 1917 is that the Bolshevik Revolution did not have to happen, and neither does the current revolution playing out throughout the West. “The Left does not have to win. But for today’s Right to check the Left and achieve victory, it will need leaders who possess the nerves and confidence that the Russian leaders depicted by Solzhenitsyn entirely lacked”—something sorely lacking at this point. (63; emphasis in text) As Solzhenitsyn noted in his play Prisoners,

We clutch at life with convulsive intensity—that’s how we get caught. We want to go on living at any, any price. We accept all the degrading conditions, and this way we save—not ourselves—we save the prosecutor. But he who doesn’t value his life is unconquerable, untouchable. There are such people. (70; italics in text)

At this point, the Right in the West needs such people to win.

We can only imagine how many intelligent, well-meaning Russians were swayed by the liberal-left media, wanting to be seen as a good person, and conforming to whatever mandates the left proposed. They supported the left and looked forward to the utopian, classless future promised by the Bolsheviks. What is clear now is that there are millions of White voters throughout the contemporary West, many of them calling themselves conservatives, who have been eager to embrace today’s promised utopian future of racial harmony and equal outcomes for all races.

Two Hundred Years Together

The longest section of Solzhenitsyn and the Right discusses Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, placing “much of the blame for the October Revolution, the atrocities of the early Soviet period, and subversive Left-wing behavior in general squarely on the shoulders of the Jews. [Solzhenitsyn] also … exonerates much of Tsarist Russia from the charge of anti-Semitism, which Jewish authors never seem to tire of leveling. … Dissidents on the Right should take advantage of Solzhenitsyn’s fame and cite him as often as possible in the battlefield of ideas—especially when it comes to the Jewish question.” (83, 84)

Jews were heavily overrepresented in Lenin’s inner circle and indeed, in Lenin in Zurich “Solzhenitsyn offers tantalizing evidence that the October Revolution would not have occurred (or would not have been successful) without actions carried out by Jews at its most critical moments.” (47)

Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn often bent over backwards not to be negative about Jews. Quinn notes that “Solzhenitsyn was no anti-Semite. There are many passages in this work that demonstrate a desire to show justice, even tenderness, toward Jews. It cannot be denied that he had great respect for them” (84)—a trait, as Quinn notes, that is entirely lacking in vast majority of Jewish writers commenting on the behavior of White gentiles toward Jews. And commenting on Jewish characters in his play Republic of Labor, Solzhenitsyn noted in Two Hundred Years Together that he had fictionalized them somewhat because the truth “would be inevitably considered anti-Jewish incitement (as if that trio of Jews was not inflaming it in real life, caring little about consequences).” (78)

Departing from Solzhenitsyn, Quinn eschews any perspective that flinches from dealing honestly with Jews. White nations are in the process of being subjugated and the great majority of Jews, including many wealthy, politically involved Jews and Jews with prominent positions in the media, support this revolution. Of course, this does not mean that White advocates should be dishonest, only that they should not flinch from the truth. So despite what Solzhenitsyn would have advocated, “the value and importance of Two Hundred Years Together cannot be overstated.” (86) What follows then are three chapters listing the “misdeeds” (87) of the Jews.

Solzhenitsyn notes that Jews began to be represented among revolutionaries in the 1870s after originally being underrepresented. The reason for this was that leftist revolutionaries often viewed Jews as exploiters—a perspective that disappeared from revolutionary rhetoric after Jews became prominent among them. This is an important point that is missing from typical accounts by Jewish historians. From Separation and Its Discontents (Ch. 2, pp. 41–42):

Emancipation often accentuated the importance of resource competition as a source of anti-Semitism. Lindemann (1991, 17) notes that Jews in pre-emancipation Russia “were viewed by the authorities and by much of the rest of population as a foreign, separate, exploitative, and distressingly prolific nation.” The official Russian view was that emancipation had resulted in Jews economically dominating and exploiting the Slavic peasants (Judge 1992, 9, 11). The following passage, from an article published in 1893 by M. Pierre Botkine, the Secretary of the Russian Legation in Washington, was also emphasized by Goldwin Smith (1894, 248) in his anti-Jewish writing. It combines the issue of economic domination with the loyalty issue … :

The Hebrew, as we know him in Russia, is “the eternal Jew.” Without a country of his own, and as a rule, without any desire to become identified with the country he for the time inherits, he remains, as for hundreds of years he has been, morally unchangeable and without a faculty for adapting himself to sympathy with the people of the race which surrounds him. He is not homogeneous with us in Russia; he does not feel or desire solidarity with us. In Russia he remains a guest only—a guest from long ago, and not an integral part of the community. When these guests without affinity became too many in Russia, when in several localities their numbers were found injurious to the welfare and the prosperity of our own people as a whole, when they had grown into many wide-spreading ramifications of influence and power, and abused their opportunities as traders with or lenders of money to the poor—when, in a word, they became dangerous and prejudicial to our people—is there anything revolting or surprising in the fact that our government found it necessary to restrict their activity? . . . Is it just that those who have never had to confront such a situation should blame us for those measures?

            Our peasantry has only recently been organized in their existing social relations, and is not yet well educated, or well trained in the exercise of social rights or obligations under their present system. . . . If we take into consideration the character of the Slavonian folk, it is easy to understand why our meek, ignorant, and easy-going peasantry fell under the control of the Jews, who, as a class, are far better educated and more thrifty, and have the aptitude for commerce and for money making which distinguishes their race everywhere—and who readily perceived and soon abused their superiority in those particulars, after the emancipation of the serfs had deprived them individually of the safeguards the old system of things had afforded them. This Jewish influence was everywhere oppressive, and now and then became an unbearable yoke. The peasants in some localities, having lost all patience, were guilty of violent excesses, mobbed the Jews, and destroyed their property. (Botkine 1893, 613–614)

Solzhenitsyn presents numerous Jewish writers who basically say the same thing: that diaspora Jews do not identify with the country they reside in. Israeli author A. B. Yoshua: “The Galut [diaspora] is an immoral creature. He uses all the benefits of his host country but at the same time he does not identify with it.” (129) As has often been the case, Zionists had a much more realistic perspective on Jews, and often regarded Jews as a separate ethnicity and acknowledged that anti-Semitism was a natural reaction to Jews as foreigners. A statement published by the Zionist Federation of Germany after the National Socialists came to power stated “Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition” (SAID, Ch 5, 161).

Continuing SAID (Ch. 2, 42–43) on Jews as oppressors in nineteenth-century Russia:

In 1881 a government document decried the failure of its twenty-year-long campaign to fuse the Russian and Jewish populations and perceived the problem to be “the exploitation [by the Jews] of the indigenous population and mostly of the poorer classes” (in Frankel 1981, 64). This was the view of official American government observers as well (see Goldstein 1990, 36, 290), and it was also apparent in the Jewish revolutionary socialist Hayim Zhitlowski (1972, 129): “Whenever I turned my eyes to ordinary, day-to-day Jewish life, I saw only one thing, that which the antisemites were agitating about: the injurious effect of Jewish merchantry on Russian peasantry. No matter how I felt, from a socialist point of view, I had to pass a death sentence not only on individual Jews but on the entire Jewish existence of individual Jews” (italics in text).[i]

Gentile revolutionaries were also prone to anti-Semitic pronouncements. In 1869 the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin stated of the Jews that “their history, since well before the Christian era, has imprinted on them a trait essentially mercantile and bourgeois, which means, taken as a nation, they are par excellence the exploiters of the work of others, and they have a horror and a natural fear of the masses of the people, whom, moreover, they hate, openly or secretly” (in Rather 1990, 178). The revolutionary party Narodnaia Volia took a tolerant view toward the 1881 pogroms and issued the following statement to the Ukrainian people:

The people in the Ukraine suffer worst of all from the Jews. Who takes the land, the woods, the taverns from out of your hands? The Jews. From whom does the muzhik [peasant], often with tears in his eyes, have to beg permission to get to his own field, his own plot of land?—the Jews. Wherever you look, wherever you go—the Jews are everywhere. The Jew curses you, cheats you, drinks your blood. . . . But as soon as the muzhiki rise up to free themselves from their enemies as they did in Elizavetgrad, Kiev, Smela, the tsar at once comes to the rescue of the Jews: the soldiers from Russia are called in and the blood of the muzhik, Christian blood, flows. . . . You have begun to rebel against the Jews. You have done well. Soon the revolt will be taken up across all of Russia against the tsar, the pany [landowners], the Jews. (In Frankel 1981, 98)[ii]

Importantly, the previous footnote concludes: “In later years, Jews assumed a much larger role in the revolutionary movement in Russia. This resulted in a very different interpretation of the 1881 pogroms. Writing in 1905 during another period of pogroms, the Jewish socialist theorist Shimen Dubnov attributed the 1881 pogroms to “imaginary economic factors,” while the recent pogroms had been the result of “revenge for the revolutionary activity of the Jews” (in Frankel 1981, 136). Workers and peasants were active participants in the 1905 pogroms as well.” In other words, what had originally been a movement dominated by non-Jews had been transformed in a manner congruent with Jewish interests. Solzhenitsyn notes that by the 1880s and 1890s Jews became disproportionately involved in revolution—between a quarter and a third of revolutionaries were Jews and Jews constituted 37 percent of political prisoners despite being only 5 percent of the population.

Like 1960s Jewish radicals (The Culture of Critique, Ch. 3), Russian-Jewish radicals of the late nineteenth century tended to come from wealthy families and were not estranged from their families, both of which were often the case with non-Jewish radicals.

One thing that may surprise many, given the representations of Jews in the popular media and the occupational and social class profile of Jews in the West, is how violent these Jewish revolutionaries were. Solzhenitsyn notes that the 1903 pogrom in Gomel, Belarus was started when “armed and organized gangs of Jews had instigated the pogrom against Russians. … All the casualties were Russian.” But when the troops arrived, they protected the wealthy Jewish parts of the city, “and to show their appreciation, the Jews fired guns and threw stones at them.” (89) These Jews were angry because of the Kishinev pogrom which had happened 6 months previously. Nevertheless, when many Jews showed how violent and sadistic they could be after the Bolsheviks came to power, there was widespread surprise. As I noted in a review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century:

Many of the commentators on Jewish Bolsheviks noted the ‘transformation’ of Jews: In the words of another Jewish commentator, G. A. Landau, ‘cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical activity.’ And another Jewish commentator, Ia. A Bromberg, noted that: the formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of “unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness”…. The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness (Slezkine, 183–184).

This psychological “transformation” of Russian Jews was probably not all that surprising to the Russians themselves, given [Maxim] Gorky’s finding that Russians prior to the Revolution saw Jews as possessed of “cruel egoism” and that they were concerned about becoming slaves of the Jews.

Quinn notes that all of the blameworthy aspects of Jewish behavior in Gomel have been whitewashed by Jewish historians, and that Jewish accounts of the Kishinev pogrom routinely ignore Jewish behavior as implicated. Moreover, as Andrew Joyce has documented, Jewish accounts at the time played up various hoaxes of Jewish victimization (“Babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob,” as a New York Times article claimed).

And it’s no surprise that Jews became the primary theorists of revolution—they “tirelessly propounded anarchism, socialism, and other disruptive ideologies.” (91) It’s also fascinating that a pro-Jewish party and the Jewish press supported the Duma’s refusal to lift restrictions on Jews, likely as a strategic move to retain Jewish ardor in the revolutionary efforts. As Quinn notes, “we should never take the Left, especially the Jewish left at its word. Any progressive agenda is merely a smokescreen for destroying traditional gentile power structures and replacing them with totalitarianism.” (93; italics in text) And regarding the press, it’s no surprise that, as Solzhenitsyn notes, it “was dominated by left-wing or radical Jews who occupied key positions” (94) And it’s hard not to relate to the lament of a Russian newspaper editor in 1905 who noted that “The Jews have bet heavily on the card of revolution” and that Russians “who think seriously have understood that in such movements the press represents a force and that this force is not in their hands, but in that of their adversaries.” (94) In all of this, Solzhenitsyn bends over backwards to present Jewish actions favorably, but, as Quinn notes, “struggles with his evenhandedness [and] his efforts get more strained as the book goes on.” (105)

So it’s no surprise that Jews were overrepresented in the October Revolution or subsequent governments—6 of 12 of the conspirators and, according to mass murderer Lazar Kaganovich, “the vast majority of the presidium at the table were Jews,” as well as at least half of Lenin’s first Soviet Politburo. (103)

Not that other peoples weren’t involved. While Russians remained a minority in the power structure, other groups­—Poles, Latvians, Georgians also played a role, and the Russians who did participate were basically psychopaths. As I noted in the Preface to the 2002 edition of The Culture of Critique (p. 32):

It is interesting that many of the non-Jewish Bolsheviks were members of non-Russian ethnic groups or, as noted in CofC, were married to Jewish women. It was a common perception during the early stages of the Soviet Union that the government was dominated by “a small knot of foreigners” (Szajkowski 1977, 55). Stalin, Beria, and Ordzhonikidze were Georgians; Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless head of the Checka (Secret Police) during the 1920s, was a Pole with strong pro-Jewish attitudes. The original Cheka was made up largely of non-Russians, and the Russians in the Cheka tended to be sadistic psychopaths and criminals (Werth 1999, 62; Wolin & Slusser 1957, 6)—people who are unlikely to have any allegiance to or identification with their people.

Quinn notes that Solzhenitsyn accepts “for the sake of argument” that Bolshevik Jews were renegade Jews (Otshchepentsy), but then wonders why these same Jews hesitate to apply this argument to Russian Bolsheviks. The above indicates that the Russian Bolsheviks tended not to identify with their people—marrying into a group that was widely despised by Russians and counting among them “sadistic psychopaths and criminals.” On the other hand, there is a great deal of evidence that in general Jewish communists retained a strong sense of Jewish identity. This is a critical question because a standard Jewish rationale for Jewish involvement in communism was that these revolutionaries were not really Jews—that they had become entirely removed from any Jewish identity. From The Culture of Critique (Ch. 3):

Several factors favor our supposing that Jewish identification occurred in a substantial percentage of ethnic Jews [in the USSR]: (1) People were classified as Jews depending on their ethnic background at least partly because of residual anti-Semitism; this would tend to impose a Jewish identity on these individuals and make it difficult to assume an exclusive identity as a member of a larger, more inclusive political group. (2) Many Jewish Bolsheviks, such as those in Evsektsiya [an explicitly Jewish section of the Communist Party] and the JAC [Jewish Anti-fascist Committee), aggressively sought to establish a secular Jewish subculture. (3) Very few Jews on the left envisioned a postrevolutionary society without a continuation of Judaism as a group; indeed, the predominant ideology among Jewish leftists was that postrevolutionary society would end anti-Semitism because it would end class conflict and the peculiar Jewish occupational profile. (4) The behavior of American communists shows that Jewish identity and the primacy of Jewish interests over communist interests were commonplace among individuals who were ethnically Jewish communists. … (5) The existence of Jewish crypsis in other times and places combined with the possibility that self-deception, identificatory flexibility, and identificatory ambivalence are important components of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 8). …

Consider the case of Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (Premier of the USSR during the 1930s) and a prominent revolutionary who joined the Communist Party in 1918. (Among other accomplishments, she was a member of the Party Central Committee.) When Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union in 1948, Zhemchuzhina repeatedly uttered the phrase “Ich bin a Yiddishe tochter” (I am a daughter of the Jewish people) when Meir asked how she spoke Yiddish so well (Rubenstein 1996, 262). “She parted from the [Israeli delegation] with tears in her eyes, saying ‘I wish all will go well for you there and then it will be good for all the Jews’ ” (Rubenstein 1996, 262). Vaksberg (1994, 192) describes her as “an iron Stalinist, but her fanaticism did not keep her from being a “good Jewish daughter.”

Consider also the case of Ilya Ehrenburg, the prominent Soviet journalist and anti-fascist propagandist for the Soviet Union whose life is described in a book whose title, Tangled Loyalties (Rubenstein 1996), illustrates the complexities of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg was a loyal Stalinist, supporting the Soviet line on Zionism and refusing to condemn Soviet anti-Jewish actions (Rubenstein 1996). Nevertheless, Ehrenburg held Zionist views, maintained Jewish associational patterns, believed in the uniqueness of the Jewish people, and was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Ehrenburg was an organizing member of the JAC, which advocated Jewish cultural revival and greater contact with Jews abroad. A writer friend described him as “first of all a Jew. . . . Ehrenburg had rejected his origins with all his being, disguised himself in the West, smoking Dutch tobacco and making his travel plans at Cook’s. . . . But he did not erase the Jew” (p. 204). “Ehrenburg never denied his Jewish origins and near the end of his life often repeated the defiant conviction that he would consider himself a Jew ‘as long as there was a single anti-Semite left on earth’ ” (Rubenstein 1996, 13). In a famous article, he cited a statement that “blood exists in two forms; the blood that flows inside the veins and the blood that flows out of the veins. . . . Why do I say, ‘We Jews?’ Because of blood” (p. 259). Indeed, his intense loyalty to Stalin’s regime and his silence about Soviet brutalities involving the murder of millions of its citizens during the 1930s may have been motivated largely by his view that the Soviet Union was a bulwark against fascism (pp. 143–145). “No transgression angered him more than anti-Semitism” (p. 313).

A powerful residual Jewish identity in a prominent Bolshevik can also be seen in the following comment on the reaction of ethnic Jews to the emergence of Israel:

It seemed that all Jews, regardless of age, profession, or social status, felt responsible for the distant little state that had become a symbol of national revival. Even the Soviet Jews who had seemed irrevocably assimilated were now under the spell of the Middle Eastern miracle. Yekaterina Davidovna (Golda Gorbman) was a fanatic Bolshevik and internationalist and wife of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, and in her youth she had been excommunicated as an unbeliever; but now she struck her relatives dumb by saying, “Now at last we have our motherland, too.” (Kostyrchenko 1995, 102)

Solzhenitsyn, despite wanting to share blame for the October Revolution and the atrocities that followed, states that “Jews were the driving force behind the October Revolution.” (106) The horror of the early Soviet regime is almost impossible to comprehend. Solzhenitsyn describes the early days of the Russian Civil War not as a war, but as the “liquidation of a former adversary” (108). It was routine to execute their victims without trial, the only “evidence” needed being the social class membership of the victims.

Solzhenitsyn, commenting on the change in attitude among Soviet Jews after Jews became targets of Soviet oppression after World War II:

The Soviet government was as unjust and cruel [after the Revolution] as it was to be in 1937 and 1950. But in the Twenties the bloodlust did not raise alarm or resistance in the wider Jewish population since its force was aimed not at Jewry. (115)

Further, “Solzhenitsyn mordantly points out how convenient it was for his critics to profess outrage over these crimes [i.e., the hundreds of thousands of deaths involved in the construction of the Belomor Canal between Lake Onega and the White Sea] only decades after they had been committed. At the time, however, nearly all Jewish voices were silent; and most remain till this day—except when they want to heap more scorn on Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Semite.” (122)

Similarly, criticism of the USSR among Jews in the United States did not become widespread until there were signs that Jews were being persecuted in the USSR. Indeed, the origins of the neoconservative movement (a Jewish intellectual and political movement) can be traced to the 1950s. For example, Sydney Hook was “deeply concerned about the emergence of anti-Semitism in the USSR.”

Until the Moscow Trials of the 1930s he was blind to the violence and oppression in the USSR. During a visit to the USSR in 1929, “I was completely oblivious at the time to the systematic repressions that were then going on against noncommunist elements and altogether ignorant of the liquidation of the so-called kulaks that had already begun that summer. I was not even curious enough to probe and pry, possibly for fear of what I would discover.” During the 1930s, when the Communist Party exercised a dominant cultural influence in the United States, “the fear of fascism helped to blur our vision and blunt our hearing to the reports that kept trickling out of the Soviet Union.” Even the Moscow Trials were dismissed by large sectors of liberal opinion. It was the time of the Popular Front, where the fundamental principle was the defense of the Soviet Union. Liberal journals like the New Republic did not support inquiries into the trials, citing New York Times reporter Walter Duranty as an authority who believed in the truth of the confessions. (“Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” p. 36)

Solzhenitsyn portrays the 1930s as the height of Jewish power in the USSR: “Despite offering the caveat that Jews never constituted all of these powerful organizations, Solzhenitsyn goes on for pages detailing the Jewish dominance of Soviet economics, diplomacy, culture, and politics during the 1930s. … And this was occurring while Stalin was supposedly purging Jews from the Party” (119, 120)

Ethnic networking was pervasive, including in the Gulag and in the construction of the Belomor Canal noted above. Quinn on the Gulag: “They were known to recruit other Jews for privileged positions among the medical staff, even if those they recruited had no medical training” (120) Solzhenitsyn again goes into voluminous detail, naming Jews so privileged, and then noting “Is it really reasonable to suppose that Jews were digging soil with their shovels and racing with their hand-barrows and dying under those barrows from exhaustion and emaciation?” He also notes one non-Jew with the name Bernstein who received privileged treatment because he was thought to be a Jew: “Jews took him for one of their own and never failed to help him when he needed it.” Which reminds me that a well-known article by media critic William Cash provided anecdotal evidence that individuals disguised themselves as Jews in their attempst to become accepted in the movie industry. (SAID, Ch. 2, note 40, p. 84)

Quinn discusses the negative Jewish reception to his work. Even before Two Hundred Years Together, Solzhenitsyn stated, “Even at the height of the battle at the [USSR’s] Secretariat of the Writers’ Union I was not inveighed against with such bile, such personal, passionate hate, as I was now by America’s pseudo-educated elite.” (147) Regarding the reception of Two Hundred Years Together, Quinn notes that Jewish writers have “said little about the vast suffering of Russians during the Soviet period or cared to refute Solzhenitsyn’s linking of high-level Jews … to the suffering.” (130)

No surprise there. Nothing has changed. The Jewish unwillingness to see the enormity of Jewish behavior during the Soviet period and really for the entire gamut of Western history continues into the present. Quinn makes the obvious conclusion: “As whites slowly become minorities in their homelands, Solzhenitsyn’s calls for hope and reconciliation sound more and more like the stuff of fantasy. … How much longer can we afford to hope?” (131) Indeed.

And I agree with Quinn that “white identity is the only solution to Jewish conquest.” (134) In the Russian case, Solzhenitsyn shows that even a rather tepid sense of Russian ethnocentrism was enough to make many Jews leave Russia in the later decades of the Soviet regime. Quinn concludes: “If it can be done there, it can be done anywhere.” (134, emphasis in original) Nevertheless, only the rise of Vladimir Putin, who tamed the Jewish oligarchs who had basically inherited the Soviet economy after the fall of the USSR, prevented the Jews from once again dominating Russia—a source of much of the hatred toward Russia that we see today, especially from neoconservatives.

Besides an upsurge in White identity—which does seem to be happening, we therefore need strong leadership at the political level, and that is sorely lacking. The courage that has been in evidence in so much of the history of the West and enabled its many accomplishments is in short supply. And, as Solzhenitsyn noted in his much-maligned Harvard address of 1978, “Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?” (21)

Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right is essential reading, and certainly not only for those already well read on White identity and White interests. It will also be a red pill for many who continue to be under the spell of the current culture of Western suicide.

                [i]. The following report from British Vice-Consul L. Wagstaff sums up the public perception of the social and economic causes of anti-Semitism leading to the pogroms of 1881 in Russia and reflects many of the themes of this section and the previous section:

It is chiefly as brokers or middlemen that the Jews are so prominent. Seldom a business transaction of any kind takes place without their intervention, and from both sides they receive compensation. To enumerate some of their other occupations, constantly denounced by the public: they are the principal dealers in spirits; keepers of “vodka” (drinking) shops and houses of ill-fame; receivers of stolen goods; illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. A branch they also succeed in is as government contractors. With their knowledge of handling money, they collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast amounts annually. In fact, the malpractices of some of the Jewish community have a bad influence on those whom they come in contact with. It must, however, be said that there are many well educated, highly respectable Jews in Russia, but they form a small minority. . . . They thoroughly condemn the occupations of their lower brethren. . . . They themselves acknowledge the abuses practised by some of their own members, and suggest remedial measures to allay the irritation existing among the working classes.

Another thing the Jews are accused of is that there exists among them a system of boycotting; they use their religion for business purposes. . . . For instance, in Bessarabia, the produce of a vineyard is drawn for by lot, and falls, say to Jacob Levy; the other Jews of the district cannot compete with Levy, who buys the wine at his own price. In the leasing by action of government and provincial lands, it is invariably a Jew who outbids the others and afterwards re-lets plots to the peasantry at exorbitant prices. . . .

Their fame as usurers is well known. Given a Jewish recruit with a few roubles’ capital, it can be worked out, mathematically, what time it will take him to become the money-lender of his company or regiment, from the drummer to the colonel. Take the case of a peasant: if he once gets into the hands of this class, he is irretrievably lost. The proprietor, in his turn, from a small loan gradually mortgages and eventually loses his estate. A great deal of landed property in south Russia has of late years passed into the hands of the Israelites but principally into the hands of intelligent and sober peasants.

From first to last, the Jew has his hand in everything. He advances the seed for sowing, which is generally returned in kind—quarters for bushels. As harvest time comes around, money is required to gather in the crops. This is sometimes advanced on hard conditions; but the peasant has no choice; there is no one to lend him money, and it is better to secure something than to lose all. Very often the Jew buys the whole crop as it stands in the field on his own terms. It is thus seen that they themselves do not raise agricultural products, but they reap the benefits of others’ labour, and steadily become rich, while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being sapped of its vitality.

The vice-consul also noted that peasants often say when they see the property of a Jew, “That is my blood.” The complaints of the pogromists also included charges that Russian girls in service at Jewish households were sexually exploited.

                [ii]. Other pronouncements from revolutionaries during the period stated that “one should not hit the Jew because he is a Jew and prays to his own God . . . but because he plunders the people, sucks the blood of the workingman”; and, “The Jew owns the bars and taverns, rents land from the landowners and then leases it out to the peasant at two or three times the rate, he buys wheat on the field, goes in for money lending and charges percentages so high that people call them simply ‘Yiddish’ rates” (in Frankel 1981, 100). A Jewish socialist, Pavel Borisovich Akselrod, analyzed the situation by writing that “however great the poverty and deprivation suffered by the Jewish masses . . . the fact remains that, taken overall, some half of them function as a nonproductive element, sitting astride the neck of the lower classes in Russia” (in Frankel 1981, 105). These comments agree with the assessment of the British Vice-Consul quoted in note 21. …