Lazar Kaganovich

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Projection: Who Were the Victims in the Ukraine?

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The current TOO blog by Kevin MacDonald addresses Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 19 of Solzhenitsyn’s book on Jews and Russians, 200 Years Together. The main point is that:

The decade of the 1930s was tragic almost beyond description. . . . However, the suffering of Jews pales in comparison to the suffering of the Ukrainian and Russian farmers undergoing forced collectivization. Moreover, Jews were never targeted as Jews, and in general Jews remained vastly overrepresented in elite positions throughout the period, even after the purges.

MacDonald notes that “Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the culpability of the West.” In particular, we have this damning point:

In 1932–33, in Russia and Ukraine —on the very outskirts of Europe, five to six million people died from hunger! And the free press of the free world maintained utter silence… And even if we take into account the extreme Leftist bias of the contemporary Western press and its devotion to the socialist “experiment” in the USSR, it is still impossible not to be amazed at the degree to which they could go to be blind and insensitive to the sufferings of even tens of millions of fellow humans.

One powerful clue we have to this twisted mystery is the effort even now to grotesquely turn the genocide of Ukrainians in the 1930s into a story of the victims themselves slaughtering the actual murderers. In a review of a new book, Professor David O’Connell, writing in Culture Wars, finds that canny efforts by those in the Jewish community have again succeeded in getting a Catholic spokesman to do the propaganda bidding of the Jews. Read more

In the 1930s: Chapter 19 of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s “200 Years Together”

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The project of translating Alexandr Solzhenitisyn’s 200 Years Together into English continues apace. The 18,000-word Chapter 19, “In the 1930s” is now available (see here). The decade of the 1930s was tragic almost beyond description. The main idea advanced by Solzhenitsyn is that all segments of Soviet society suffered, including Jews who had been members of the elite. However, the suffering of Jews pales in comparison to the suffering of the Ukrainian and Russian farmers undergoing forced collectivization. Moreover, Jews were never targeted as Jews, and in general Jews remained vastly overrepresented in elite positions throughout the period, even after the purges.

Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the culpability of the West. The brutal process of industrialization was carried out with the cooperation of Western merchants and bankers eager to do business with the Soviet Union. Such commercial cooperation had been prohibited under the Czars because Jewish activist organizations had pressured governments not to do business with Russia because of its treatment of Jews — much as there are now sanctions against trading with Iran because of the concerns of the Israel Lobby. As we also see today, financial and commercial interests were not concerned with ideological commitment to capitalism or with human rights but simply sought to expand their profits.  Trade was allowed because there was the perception in the West that “Soviet power would not oppress the Jews, but on the contrary, that many of them would remain at the levers of power.” Read more