Two Hundred Years Together

Brian C. Anderson writes about the new biography: Mahoney devotes a chapter to defending Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume history of the relations between Russians and Jews, Two Hundred Years Together, from the accusations of anti-Semitism that some have made against it. The main basis of those charges is Solzhenitsyn’s willingness to discuss—and detail—the “disproportionate” presence of Jews in the early Leninist state’s repression machine. Yet the critics “never really challenge the accuracy of the facts to which Solzhenitsyn draws our attention,” Mahoney observes, which the refuznik Natan Sharansky has pointed out as well. And Solzhenitsyn never blames Jews for the Bolshevik takeover: a tiny Jewish minority could never drag the massive Russian nation into the Communist underworld, he recognizes. Moreover, adds Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn’s study acknowledges the uniqueness of the Holocaust and carefully documents the pogroms and abuses Jews suffered in Russia and the Soviet Union across time. Solzhenitsyn’s purpose in Two Hundred Years Together is simply to encourage both Russians and Jews to take responsibility for the actions of their “renegade” predecessors during the twentieth century. In such mutual repentance, he believed, lay forgiveness. “A fair-minded critic can only conclude that there is nothing anti-Semitic or nationalistic” about Solzhenitsyn’s effort, says Mahoney.