Table Of ContentJews in the USSR and in the Future Russia
1968
The work was published in 2000 without Solzhenitsyn’s knowledge or consent. There may be
distortions in the text.
To tell the truth is to please no one.
Introduction 1
1. Is there a Jewish question? 4
2. How anti-Semitism arose 8
3. But what is "anti-Semitism"? 13
4. Dare to judge nations? 15
5. The mysteries of the chosen people 20
6. The Jews in Tsarist Russia 23
7. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and 26
the Lenin-Jewish Revolution in Russia
8. In the Revolution and immediately after 35
9. In literature in particular 44
10. In Stalin’s time 50
11. In the camps 55
12. Are the Jews oppressed compared to 60
the Russians?
13. Talent, Character 64
14. Freedom-loving today 66
15. And now for the flaw 68
16. Through Their Eyes – Our Trough 73
17. The Russian Question 75
18. Israel 78
19. What should we do tomorrow? 82
20. How not to make a mistake... 87
A voluminous, sharp-toothed, ungraspable stone, which we cannot lift, and yet we must.
Today, it’s still a question that can be dodged. Tomorrow, we can still get around it. But I
foresee how, the day after tomorrow, it will make a comeback by itself, and a lot of bad things
will happen if we do not ponder it beforehand.
I foresee a happy (and divisive) time (if only we live to see it!), when we will be releasing
our marginal prisoners from their cages. There will be misunderstandings, high-handed and low-
handed grievances, but all this will be brightened by tears of joy, the most valuable tears of
mankind. By this seeming sacrifice, Russia for the first time in many hundreds of years will be
purified, and thus free itself to develop internally, in order to turn, for the first time ever,
completely inward.
But as soon as we have laid aside all the living branches at the fringe and want to remain
as one trunk, alone in our home, we find out that not all of the national intertwining has been
untangled: The Jewish one remains. That’s when its threads will be stretched to the point of
ringing, always painful, always tense.
And the "coexistence", proclaimed so importantly (and deceitfully) by us to the entire
world, we will first have to solve at home.
Even to write about the Jewish question is to walk on a knife edge. On both sides you feel
the hateful eyes, the reproaches, the accusations, and the curses. For one and the same, the most
unambiguous phrases you hear at the same time are – "you betrayed the Jews!" in one ear, "and
you are with the anti-Semites!" in the other.
They insist, they forbid: it’s not allowed! it’s not acceptable! it’s dangerous! But why
exactly?! It reminds me of another prohibition concerning concentration camps and our half-
century lived – it is also a no-go. But if we remain silent, when will we be cured? Won’t it get
worse?
I would have been glad not to try my strength on this unbearable sharpness: it has not
yet come, and today there is so much other, sharper pain. But this way it would be more peaceful
for me to write about spruce branches and bunnies with the state. Such is my fate: not a single
poisoned arrow can escape my throat, every arrow I have to take and pull out. I once embarked
on the path of talking about everything "forbidden" - and it remains for me to go on - with
responsibility and deliberation.
Personally, the last thing I would need is to write this work: not only do the Jews not
disturb me, they always help me, in today’s Soviet Union they are my unshakeable allies and
supporters, and many among them are sincere friends. And if I still undertake to write this work
– in the spirit of peace, so that our peoples better understand one another, to avoid confusion
and strife down the line – I only try to accurately express the people’s opinion, which seeks
someone’s own pen, and until it finds it and inspires it, it is itself an indecipherable rumble.
1
I began this work three years ago, and then I put it off for a long time: other things were
pressing in, much more urgent. Last year, in 1967, it seemed especially easy and encouraging to
write this work, following the six-day Arab-Israeli war, when my friends and I, wholeheartedly
and without any hesitation, were all standing up for Israel.
But I didn’t have to then. But then came our stinking, shameful attack against
Czechoslovakia, the spiritual rape of what is now perhaps the brightest nation in Europe, the
overnight strangulation of a trusting friend. In these days, it was not the behavior of our
government that caused astonishment – the government has been like this for 50 years, it is
incapable of thinking and acting otherwise – it was the behavior of our people that caused
astonishment; and again, not the vile resolutions of "approval", forced out of even the editorial
board of Novy Mir1, but the sincere complicity of corrupt and stupefied Russians. Decades of anti-
selection – cutting out the best and drugging the rest – have brought us Russians to a level of
degradation, weak-mindedness, and moral stupidity, that no European nation has ever stooped
to, to such a level of baseness that out of twenty of our faithful citizens, seventeen see in this
rape nobility and justice.
But the Soviet Jews (well, except for the most unscrupulous party dogmatists) they
understand everything! They are all for the Czechoslovaks. So even in our cloaca they retained
their clarity of judgment!
Or again: the present-day peasants of Tambov, all without exception, naturally and
without being compelled to, call the rebels of 1920-212, their most courageous and steadfast
countrymen in this largest Russian peasant revolt, bandits. They have no other word and no other
idea.
And I thought: to have the right to make any judgments about another people, one must
have a footing in one’s own moral height. But if your people have become the undeveloped
plaything of villains, the most gullible executioners of our time, are you to judge the merits and
demerits of other peoples?
1 Russian literary journal founded in 1925.
2 The Tambov Rebellion of 1920–1921 was one of the largest and best-organized peasant rebellions challenging the
Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War. The uprising took place in the territories of the modern Tambov
Oblast and part of the Voronezh Oblast, less than 300 miles southeast of Moscow.
In Soviet historiography, the rebellion was referred to as the Antonovschina ("Antonov’s mutiny"), so named after
Alexander Antonov, a former official of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who opposed the government of the
Bolsheviks. It began in August 1920 with resistance to the forced confiscation of grain and developed into a guerrilla
war against the Red Army, Cheka units and the Soviet Russian authorities. It is estimated that around 100,000 people
were arrested and around 15,000 killed during the suppression of the uprising. The Red Army used chemical weapons
to fight the peasants. The bulk of the peasant army was destroyed in the summer of 1921, smaller groups continued
until the following year. The movement was later portrayed by the Soviets as anarchical banditry, similar to other
anti-Bolshevik movements that opposed them during this period.
2
So if our lowliness deprives us of that right, we must bow our heads. And if for this reason
both the work and the author are declared incompetent, I will have nothing to object to.
3
1. Is there a Jewish question?
Maybe there is no "Jewish question"? Perhaps the very statement of it is a
misunderstanding or a crime? Maybe humanity consists in saying: no, there is no such thing as a
"Jewish question"!
Let’s ask a general question: do "national questions" exist on Earth or not? There is hardly
any disagreement here. This is where we are all amazed. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, when Europe already considered itself on the threshold of universal reason, no one
could have predicted with what ancient force the dark national feelings of all the peoples of the
world would break out precisely in this century. And in the movement of the Russian Revolution,
when they seemed especially passé, almost ridiculous, then and there were all the knots tied
anew, even tighter, more poignantly, than before. Today we have to assume that national
feelings are not on the verge of withering away, but that their beating will last, stubborn. Peaceful
and harmonious Belgium is torn by the conflict between the Flemish and Walloon languages,
well-sated Canada is overwhelmed by Quebec, quiet Switzerland is home to three different kinds
of Switzerland; shall we speak of the outskirts of the USSR? Of Africa? Of Asia? Are we surprised
that there is also a "Russian question"? We will get to it in this work.
Why shouldn’t there be a Jewish question?
As long as the national questions exist, we are forced, each in our own part of the planet,
to look for an intelligent (we assume, temporary) solution to all national existences. As soon as
national claims settle down, as soon as national borders are blurred (starting with the economy),
we will willingly move to a cosmopolitan existence. However, we must bear in mind another point
of view: that the multinationality of humanity is its versatility and richness. That the erosion of
the nation, the smoothing of levels, the rounding of edges is the impoverishment of humanity,
the entropy of the spirit. Do we not succumb to the industrial reasoning of humanity – that it is
easier to organize planetary life by means of universal uniformity? But it also makes living nastier.
In this way, we can agree to the alignment of individual characters. But today it is not the
cosmopolitans who shape the worldviews of their homelands, their peoples.
The Jewish question exists already because it is much talked about (in a muffled and
bashful way), it is even more notorious than any other national question. According to the 1959
census there are 2.3 million Jews in the Soviet Union and 1.6 million Germans. But the "German
question" in the Soviet Union is somehow unheard of.
Here are two recent world-famous examples, proving how tense the Jewish question is.
In one of the so-called "dialogues" between the East and the West (crafty devices in which
Eastern officials or novices are put in front of Western disputants, passing off official confusion
4
for their spiritual convictions), the Slovak writer L. Mňačko3 stated in early 1967 that he had never
been in conflict with the Communist authorities in his activities, except for the single case of
having his driving license taken away for a traffic violation. His French opponent angrily
countered that there was certainly one case in which Mňačko should have been in opposition:
when the neighboring Hungarian uprising was drowned in blood. But no, the suppression of
Hungary did not disturb Mňačko’s peace of mind, nor did it compel him to express any harshness
or impertinence. A few months later, the Arab-Israeli war broke out. The Novotný4 government,
with little restraint, accused Israel of aggression and broke off diplomatic relations. So what?
Mňačko, who calmly endured the Hungarian suppression, a Slovak, not Jewish, only married to a
Jewish woman, was now so agitated and outraged that he left his homeland and went to live in
Israel as a protest, already somewhat redundant.
A second example. The famous French socialist Daniel Meyer5, a Jew, at the time of the
Arab-Israeli war in June 1967, printed in the newspaper "Le Monde" that he was henceforth:
ashamed to be a socialist (because the USSR calls itself socialist and supports the enemies of
Israel), ashamed to be French (because of De Gaulle’s similar line), ashamed to be human (why
is that?), and not ashamed only of being Jewish!
Let us emphasize here: when socialists, and then peasants, were destroyed in the USSR
and the whole idea of socialism was turned upside down, this Jew was not ashamed!
We quite share both Mňačko’s and Meyer’s indignation, but we draw the reader’s
attention to the extremity, even excessiveness of their feelings in the previous long and even
humiliated tolerance. This is how heated the Jewish question is!
In the twenties, how many of our best intellectuals were shot – humanitarians and
engineers (almost exclusively Russians), many thousands! It did not put any stain on the USSR’s
reputation, no one in the world even noticed it. In 1936, doctors Pletnyov and Kazakov6 were
3 Ladislav Mňačko (1919 – 1994) was a Slovak writer and journalist. He took part in the partisan movement in Slovakia
during World War II. After the war, he was at first a staunch supporter of the Czechoslovak Communist regime and
one of its most prominent journalists. However, being disillusioned, he became the regime’s vocal critic, for which
he was persecuted and censored. In the autumn of 1967 he went to Israel as a protest against the Czechoslovak
stance during the Six-Day War, but returned to Czechoslovakia soon afterwards.
4 Antonín Josef Novotný (1904 – 1975) was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1953 to
1968, and also held the post of president of Czechoslovakia from 1957 to 1968. An ardent hardliner, Novotný was
forced to yield the reins of power to Alexander Dubček during the short-lived reform movement of 1968.
5 Daniel Raphaël Mayer (1909 – 1996) was a member of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), a
socialist party in France, president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH, Human Rights League) from 1958 to
1975.
6 The Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" (or "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites"), also known as
the Trial of the Twenty-One, was the last of the three public Moscow Trials charging prominent Bolsheviks with
espionage and treason. The Trial of the Twenty-One took place in Moscow in March 1938, towards the end of the
Soviet Great Purge.
Dmitry Dmitriyevich Pletnyov (1871 or 1872 – 1941) was a Russian doctor, medical scientist and publicist. In June
1937 Pravda published a slanderous article on Pletnyov "Professor-rapist, sadist" after which he was imprisoned in
the Lubyanka and sentenced to two years in prison on probation by a case fabricated by NKVD. In December 1937,
5
accused of murder by treatment – this went away and was quickly forgotten. But when in 1953
several Jewish doctors were accused of the same alleged crime, it immediately caused an
international outcry and even set in motion internal forces that apparently put an end to Stalin.
All this is due to the supreme sensitivity and sensibility of the Jews to their problem and
to the amicability of their protest. Not only will we not reproach the Jews for these feelings, we
understand them fully: put yourself in the position of a people that, since the dawn of its
existence, has had to develop without a territory of its own, always among strangers! We even
envy this Jewish quality; we will even urge all nations to do the same when it touches them.
But how can we say that there is no Jewish question?
It is a very real, very intense, and very painful question.
Perusing one or two books by the stubborn Jewish chauvinist Feuchtwanger7 would
suffice to enrich us with many more examples. However, quoting and arguing with Feuchtwanger
can harden any pen, and it would kill the purpose and point of our work.
The Jewish question exists already in the fact that, condemned to be scattered among
other peoples (or rather, having chosen to be scattered, more on this later), the Jews never
mingled with them, like oil never mingles with water. All these twenty-five centuries, they have
felt themselves as something separate, special – and superior (continuing the analogy, oil always
tends to float and spread like a film on the surface). The Jewish question consists in the fact that
Jews are wary of their own peculiarity – and so are those around them.
Not only does the Jewish question exist, but it stretches uninterruptedly since antiquity,
illuminated (from opposite sides) by numerous authors of ancient and modern times.
In this long history I make no claim to any erudition. I will allow myself to use data and
conclusions from a very serious scientific work by Solomon Yakovlevich Lurie8, the late Professor
Dmitri Pletnyov was again arrested and in 1938 was a defendant on the process of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists
and Trotskyites", a show trial arranged by the NKVD. He had been severely tortured – which led to paralysis of half
of his body – and deprived of sleep. So he had to "admit" absurd charges such as having caused the death of Maxim
Gorky by deliberately choosing "wrong methods of treatment" etc. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail and finally
extrajudicially executed in 1941.
Ignatius Nikolaevich Kazakov (1891 – 1938) was a Soviet physician and medical scientist, director of the State
Research Institute of Metabolism and Endocrine Disorders of the People’s Commissariat for Health.
He was arrested on December 14, 1937, accused of participation in counterrevolutionary anti-Soviet organization.
On March 13, 1938 during the trial of the anti-Soviet "Right-Trotskyist bloc" (the Third Moscow Trials) he was
sentenced to capital punishment and on March 15 was shot and buried at the Kommunarka test site (Moscow
region). Kazakov was charged with the execution (together with doctor of medical sciences Lev Levin) of OGPU
chairman Vyacheslav Menzhinsky by order of Genrikh Yagoda. He was rehabilitated on February 4, 1988.
7 Lion Feuchtwanger (1884 – 1958) was a Bavarian Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary
world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht. Feuchtwanger was
already well known throughout Germany in 1925, when his first popular novel, Jud Süß (Jew Suss), appeared.
8 Solomon Yakovlevich Lurie (original surname Luria; 1890 – 1964) was a Jewish-Soviet Hellenistic philologist and
historian of antiquity and science.
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