Was Solzhenitsyn a racist?

Question by Knowlage: Was Alexander Solzhenitsyn a racist?

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilisation. I do not agree with this opinion…the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face.

– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Answers and Views:

Answer by Fiamanillah
we all are in some way or another.

Accusations of Antisemitism

Solzhenitsyn also published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). In it, Solzhenitsyn emphatically lays the blame for the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 on the Jews, but stops short of alleging this to be the work of a “Jewish conspiracy” [25]. He purports to document the predominance of Jews in the early Bolshevik leaderships, excepting Lenin. Subsequently he was criticized for using unreliable and manipulated figures, while ignoring evidence unfavorable to his own point of view.[26] He also accused the Jews of wartime cowardice, and evasion of active duty, stating “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew.”. At the same time, he calls on both Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted in complicity with the Communist regime.

The reception of this work confirms Solzhenitsyn remained a polarizing figure both at home and abroad. According to his critics, the book confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitic views as well as his ideas of Russian supremacy over other nations.

An important critique of Solzhnitsyn’s position that debunkes the majority of his claims was published by the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern[27].

Another Russian dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich, wrote a polemical study A Portrait Against the Background of a Myth (“Портрет на фоне мифа”, 2002.), in which he paints Solzhenitsyn as flawed by egoism, anti-Semitism, and poor writing craftsmanship, describing Two Hundred Years Together as a work that is “long, tedious, and slanderous.” Voinovich had previously parodied Solzhenitsyn in his novel Moscow 2042 through the self-centered egomaniacal character, Sim Simych Karnavalov, an extreme and brutal dictatorial writer who tries to destroy the Soviet Union and, eventually, to become the king of Russia. Using a more circuitous line of argument, Joseph Brodsky, in his essay “Catastrophes in the Air” (in Less than One), argued that Solzhenitsyn, while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet Communism, failed to discern that the historical crimes he unearthed might be the outcome of authoritarian traits that were really part of the heritage of Old Russia and of “the severe spirit of Orthodoxy” (venerated by Solzhenitsyn) and much less due to the more recent (Marxist) political ideology.

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