Ce qui se jouait, c’était le sort des Kalmouks, des Tatars de Crimée, des Tchètchènes et des Balkares exilés, sur ordre de Staline, en Sibérie et au Kazakhstan, ayant perdu le droit de se souvenir de leur histoire, d’enseigner à leurs enfants dans leur langue maternelle. Ce qui se jouait […] c’était le sort des Juifs, que l’Armée rouge avait sauvés, et sur la tête desquels Staline s’apprêtait à abattre le glaive qu’il avait repris des mains de Hitler, commémorant ainsi le dixième anniversaire de la victoire du peuple à Stalingrad. Vassili Grossman (”Vie et Destin”)
Les grandes convictions comportent leur part d’aveuglement, les grandes vérités leur revers d’ombre. Georges Nivat
Les grands sages sont tyranniques comme des généraux, tout aussi impolis et indélicats, car assurés de l’impunité. Tchékhov (parlant de Tolstoï)
Retour sur le reproche probablement le plus sérieux contre Soljenitsyne, à savoir celui de son antisémitisme.
Possédé par une seule idée et porteur d’un seul message, le romancier qui avait devancé les historiens manifesta en effet toute sa vie les limites de ce qui lui avait précisément permis de résister, survivre et triompher de “l’horreur politique et humaine qu’il avait subie” au goulag.
A la fois dans ses convictions avec son ancrage religieux ultra-orthodoxe depuis sa conversion de 1957.
Mais aussi dans ses méthodes de travail avec l’habitude, née de la nécessité, de travailler sur des sources de seconde main et de ré-écrire l’histoire à partir des formidables capacités de mémoire qu’il avait dû développer.
D’où sa constante dénonciation nationaliste des modèles culturels étrangers accusés de corrompre la civilisation chrétienne ses évidents côtés réactionnaire, nationaliste et anti-juif, son anti-occidentalisme » sa « glèbophilie, son « isolationnisme opposé à la conception universaliste à nombre des autres dissidents, notamment ceux qui avaient émigré, mêlé probablement de ressentiment envers des rivaux plus jeunes et mieux dotés, intellectuellement ou par le sort.
D’où, malgré sa seconde épouse et ses nombreux amis juifs ou son admiration pour Israël (notamment pour ses vertus théocratiques mais probablement aussi selon le bon vieux principe du chacun chez soi) son relatif silence sur les écrivains d’origine juive assassinés par Staline dans l’Archipel comme son insistence sur les noms juifs des premiers tchékistes, fondateurs du Goulag.
Ainsi, dans Une journée, la figure de planqué du juif César Markovitch ou le tchékiste Frenkel du livre I de l’Archipel dont il dit qu’il lui semblait haïr son pays.
Ou, plus tard, dans Lénine à Zurich, Parvus apparaît comme une sorte d’éminence diabolique et cosmopolite de la révolution russe, selon, comme l’a montré Simon Markish, le stéréotype du XIVe siècle du juif qui se venge de ses malheurs).
Et bien sûr, sans parler de son opposition aux oligarques russes (étant, selon lui, à 95 % juifs, tout comme la célèbre mafia “russe”), dans ses derniers ouvrages historiques, dont Deux siècles ensemble, qui abordait les relations entre les Juifs et les Russes de 1795 à 1995.
Et notamment la question de la « russité » ou « non-russité » de la révolution de 1917, contre la thèse du maximalisme russe (Berdiaeff, Frank), sa thèse d’une origine étrangère de ladite révolution et du peuple russe comme victime principale.
Ainsi son insistence, dans Août 1914 et tout en rejetant catégoriquement la thèse du “complot juif”, sur la judéité de l’assassin du Premier ministre de Nicolas II Peter Stolypin à la veille de la première guerre mondiale et de la révolution d’octobre, pour avoir, soi-disant au nom de prétendus intérêts juifs, abattu le dernier politicien libéral et dynamique qui pouvait sauver la Russie du bolchévisme.
Un certain Dmitri Bogrov, qui n’avait rien de juif sinon la naissance et qui était en fait l’un des nombreux faux révolutionnaires anarchistes et agents doubles provocateurs de la police politique secrète de la Russie impériale (et notamment de ses éléments d’extrême-droite qui en voulaient au premier ministre pour ses vélléités réformatrices), la tristement célèbre Okhrana dont, on s’en souvient, le bureau parisien avait produit les fameux faux antisémite dit des Protocoles des Sages de Sion.
Reste que, comme le rappelle le Guardian, Soljenitsyne avait de ce fait le mérite de mettre le doigt sur le fait que, comme les Russes et autres nationalités, les juifs n’étaient pas les simples spectateurs passifs ou victimes mais aussi, pour nombre d’entre eux, les agents actifs de la révolution.
Posant ainsi la question, jusque là taboue parmi les historiens sérieux, de la place des juifs dans la révolution bolchevique et dans l’appareil stalinien, dont Trotsky lui-même avait critiqué la surreprésentation dans les instances dirigeantes du parti .
Et devançant ainsi, une fois de plus et avec les limites de ses moyens à lui (et certes dans un climat particulièrement défavorable , dans la Russie de Poutine, de résurgence du nationalisme et donc de l’antisémitisme), les historiens professionnels qu’on aimerait pourtant bien entendre sur le sujet …
Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution
Nobel laureate under fire for new book on the role of Jews in Soviet-era repression
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
The Guardian,
January 25 2003
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career – the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges.
In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together – a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population – contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.
But Jewish leaders and some historians have reacted furiously to the book, and questioned Solzhenitsyn’s motives in writing it, accusing him of factual inaccuracies and of fanning the flames of anti-semitism in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn argues that some Jewish satire of the revolutionary period “consciously or unconsciously descends on the Russians” as being behind the genocide. But he states that all the nation’s ethnic groups must share the blame, and that people shy away from speaking the truth about the Jewish experience.
In one remark which infuriated Russian Jews, he wrote: “If I would care to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps was especially hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust national generalisation. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw – their life was softer than that of others.”
Yet he added: “But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect.”
Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, spent much of his life in Soviet prison camps, enduring persecution when he wrote about his experiences. He is currently in frail health, but in an interview given last month he said that Russia must come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary genocides – and that its Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them.
“My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and the psychology of the Jews – their spiritual component,” he said. “I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited. Zhabotinsky [a Jewish writer] once said that the best service our Russian friends give to us is never to speak aloud about us.”
But Solzhenitsyn’s book has caused controversy in Russia, where one Jewish leader said it was “not of any merit”.
“This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes,” said Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress. “Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews.
“This is not a book about how the Jews and Russians lived together for 200 years, but one about how they lived apart after finding themselves on the same territory. This book is a weak one professionally. Factually, it is so bad as to be beyond criticism. As literature, it is not of any merit.”
But DM Thomas, one of Solzhenitsyn’s biographers, said that he did not think the book was fuelled by anti-semitism. “I would not doubt his sincerity. He says that he firmly supports the state of Israel. In his fiction and factual writing there are Jewish characters that he writes about who are bright, decent, anti-Stalinist people.”
Professor Robert Service of Oxford University, an expert on 20th century Russian history, said that from what he had read about the book, Solzhenitsyn was “absolutely right”.
Researching a book on Lenin, Prof Service came across details of how Trotsky, who was of Jewish origin, asked the politburo in 1919 to ensure that Jews were enrolled in the Red army. Trotsky said that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka.
“Trotsky’s idea was that the spread of anti-semitism was [partly down to] objections about their entrance into the civil service. There is something in this; that they were not just passive spectators of the revolution. They were part-victims and part-perpetrators.
“It is not a question that anyone can write about without a huge amount of bravery, and [it] needs doing in Russia because the Jews are quite often written about by fanatics. Mr Solzhenitsyn’s book seems much more measured than that.”
Yet others failed to see the need for Solzhenitsyn’s pursuit of this particular subject at present. Vassili Berezhkov, a retired KGB colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), said: “The question of ethnicity did not have any importance either in the revolution or the story of the NKVD. This was a social revolution and those who served in the NKVD and cheka were serving ideas of social change.
“If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now.”
Voir aussi:
SOLZHENITSYN AND ANTI-SEMITISM: A NEW DEBATE
Richard Grenier
The NYT
November 13, 1985
The expanded version of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s ”August 1914” -containing a new section on the assassination of a Russian prime minister by an anarchist Jew – has touched off a controversy as to whether the Nobel Prize winner and author of the ”Gulag Archipelago” is anti-Semitic. The new book is already available in French and Russian and is to be published in English next year.
As the man responsible for almost single-handedly informing the West of the horrors of the Soviet Gulag, Mr. Solzhenitsyn has long been the object of Soviet efforts to destroy his reputation. But the accusations of anti-Semitism come from such impeccably anti-Communist sources as Prof. Richard Pipes of Harvard, a Soviet specialist and former director of Eastern European and Soviet Affairs on President Reagan’s National Security Council.
At a Washington conference of the World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, which ended just last week, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s purported anti-Semitism was dealt with head-on in an address by Vladislav Krasnov, a former editor of Radio Moscow’s broadcasting division who is now a professor of Russian studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. Mr. Krasnov said he found the charge ”completely groundless.” And earlier, articles on Mr. Solzhenitsyn and anti-Semitism among Russian emigres appeared in The New Republic and The Washington Post and other American newspapers.
Letters From Solzhenitsyn
Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who since his arrival in the United States has tended to remain aloof from such disputes, has been moved in this case to speak out in his own defense. In recent letters to this reporter, he denounced anti-Semitism, calling the charges against him ”base,” and declared that there is no anti-Semitism in his books nor in any other book worthy of being called literature.
Not that Mr. Solzhenitsyn has lacked defenders. Such an eminent spokesman for the Jewish community as Elie Wiesel, chronicler of the Holocaust and now a professor of the humanities at Boston University, is one of his supporters, asserting that Mr. Solzhenitsyn is an ”authentic hero.”
In addition, Mstislav Rostropovich, conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, in whose home Mr. Solzhenitsyn lived for a time in the Soviet Union, ‘’swears” that the author is no anti-Semite. And Prof. Adam Ulam of Harvard, another Soviet specialist, said Professor Pipes’s characterization of Mr. Solzhenitsyn was ”very unfair,” while Robert Conquest, author of ”The Great Terror,” called the charge of anti-Semitism ”ludicrous.” Mr. Conquest added that unfortunately the charge falls on the ears of many American Jews predisposed to believe it because their notions of Orthodox Christianity and anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe are out of date.
A Derivative Dispute
The key evidence for the current debate, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s expanded version of ”August 1914,” appeared in French almost two years ago without raising the charge of anti-Semitism. The controversy broke into the American mainstream press this year in connection with a separate if derivative dispute: whether it was prudent to broadcast over the Russian-language service of the Government-financed Radio Liberty a talk by Lev Lossev, himself a Russian Jew, discussing the possibility of anti-Semitism in the works of Mr. Solzhenitsyn.
In his broadcast, Mr. Lossev expressed clearly his conviction that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not anti-Semitic. But in presenting the adversary view, as a kind of devil’s advocate, he used such words as ‘’snake” and ”degenerate” to describe the Jewish assassin portrayed in ”August 1914” (words not used by Mr. Solzhenitsyn in the book), and it was thought that such terms beamed in Russian into the Soviet Union might be misinterpreted.
After articles inspired by this subsidiary dispute appeared in the American press, the matter was largely dropped, but the deeper questions about Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s attitude toward the Jews remain alive.
Charges of anti-Semitism against the author are not new; they began appearing in the Russian emigre press and in specialized and Jewish journals as long ago as 1972. In 1977, a full-scale analysis of the question appeared in English in Midstream, a publication of the Theodor Herzl Foundation, by a Jewish scientist named Mark Perakh. He did not deny that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was the ”greatest contemporary Russian writer” but said he felt a disproportionately large number of unattractive Jews appear in his work. He compared the ”Gulag Archipelago” unfavorably with ”The Great Terror” by Mr. Conquest, who, he said, was more impartial with respect to Jew and gentile. (Mr. Conquest vigorously denies that Mr. Solzhenitsyn is anti-Semitic and says his work contains extremely sympathetic writing about Jews.) Another charge, which goes back over a decade, is that Jews would be second-class citizens in Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s ideal Russia, a charge that Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s friends have rebutted by quoting the very work on which the charge is based, his ”Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” published in 1974, the year he was expelled from the Soviet Union. The author stated in this pamphlet that, although he saw Christianity today as ”the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia,” he proposed no special privileges for Christianity and called on the regime to ”allow competition on an equal and honorable basis . . . among all ideological and moral currents, in particular among all religions.”
But it is the expanded version of ”August 1914,” containing the new section on the 1911 assassination of Prime Minister Peter Stolypin of Russia by Dmitri Bogrov, that has given new amplitude to the debate. This assassination, little known to most Americans, is considered a turning point in Russian history by Mr. Solzhenitsyn and other Russian scholars. They believe that Stolypin was the last liberal, dynamic Russian leader (and benefactor of the Jews) who might have ‘’saved” Russia from Bolshevism.
Professor Pipes said: ”Solzhenitsyn looks into Bogrov’s mind as he is preparing to assassinate Stolypin. Stolypin is reviving Russia, therefore, it’s bad for the Jews. He assassinates him, acting entirely in his capacity as a Jew. But the historical Bogrov was a Jewish renegade, not acting as a Jew at all.
”Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn’s case, it’s not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He’s certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right’s view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of Jews.”
In an article last summer in Midstream, Lev Navrozov, a scholar who immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 and who now writes for The Yale Literary Magazine, which is owned by his son Andrei, went even further than Professor Pipes. Mr. Navrozov condemns the Solzhenitsyn novel as ”a new Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a reference to the fraudulent document that became a pillar of anti-Semitic propaganda early in this century.
‘He Is Not Anti-Semitic’
Professor Ulam takes sharp issue with the charges against Mr. Solzhenitsyn. He acknowledges that the assassination of Stolypin ”lends itself” to an anti-Semitic interpretation, but he continues: ”On balance, over all, taking into account all his work and his entire biography, I don’t think you can call Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite. He has a very sharp pen, I admit. He’s extremely passionate. He has some sharp things to say about Jews. But he has sharp things to say about Russians who are not Jews. The most you might say about Solzhenitsyn is that he resents the intrusion of foreign influences into Russian life. But an anti-Semite? No. When you take his whole work and his whole life into account, you must say that he is not anti-Semitic and that he doesn’t hate liberalism. He is inconsistent, perhaps, but many great people are inconsistent.”
Mr. Wiesel, who was raised in Eastern Europe, completely rejected the charge of anti-Semitism brought against Mr. Solzhenitsyn. ”He is too intelligent,” said Mr. Wiesel, ”too honest, too courageous, too great a writer. For Solzhenitsyn to be an anti-Semite would be wholly out of character. I am only disturbed by what seems to be an unconscious insensitivity on his part to Jewish suffering.” In an essay on Mr. Solzhenitsyn, Mr. Wiesel said he hoped that one day the Russian writer would revise or at least explain this attitude ”if for no other reason than to reassure his Jewish admirers, who want to like and respect him without reservations.” When told recently that, according to those close to him, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s attitude is that Jews are simply not ”his subject,” Mr. Wiesel said: ”Well, I understand that. As a Russian, he is concerned mainly with Russians the way I’m concerned mainly with Jews.”
Backed by a Former Dissident
Prof. Mikhail Agursky, now a Soviet expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was one of several Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union who defended Mr. Solzhenitsyn against charges of anti-Semitism. He has not changed his mind. ”He is a strong supporter of Israel and always has been,” said Professor Agursky. ”If you support Israel the way Solzhenitsyn does today, you are not an anti-Semite. And I don’t think his idea of a Russian state founded on the Russian Orthodox Church means that Jews would not have full rights. How about Israel? Let’s call a spade a spade. In Israel, religion is not separate from the state. Solzhenitsyn’s Russia would be built on the same principle.”
Writing in his own defense, a highly unusual event, Mr. Solzhenitsyn said in letters to this reporter that he is dedicated to the study of history ”just as it was,” which he feels is necessary ”in order not to repeat the horrors that humanity perpetrated on itself in the 20th century – all types of revolutionary and ethnic genocide.” His critics, he indicated, have arbitrarily ascribed anti-Semitism to him because in pre-revolutionary Russia, a period dealt with in his most recent books, ”a Jewish question existed and was a burning issue. But at that time, hundreds of authors, including Jews, wrote about this; at that time, precisely the omission of mentioning the Jewish question was considered a manifestation of anti-Semitism -and it would be unworthy for an historian of that era to pretend that that question did not exist.”
Referring to the cycle of historical novels of which ”August 1914” is the first part, the author wrote, in English: ”I am developing ‘The Red Wheel,’ the tragic history – how Russians themselves in folly destroyed both their past and their future – and in my face is flung the base accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ (cynically used as a club by some), and a string of false arguments is basely ascribed to me.
”Concerning the label ‘anti-Semitism,’ this word, just as other labels as well, has lost its precice [sic] meaning from thoughtless use, and different publicists in different decades understood it differently. If a biased and unjustified attitude toward the Jewish nation is understood by this term – then I tell you assuredly: not only is there no – nor could there be – ‘anti-Semitism’ in my work, nor for that matter in any book worthy of being called literature. To approach a literary work with the measuring stick of ‘anti-Semitism’ is vulgar, an under-developed understanding of the nature of a literary work. By this measuring stick Shakespeare could be proclaimed ‘anti-Semite,’ and his creative work struck out.”
Willing to go further in his defense than Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself was his wife, Natalia, who is herself half-Jewish. The charge of anti-Semitism is ”nonsensical” and ”absolutely absurd,” Mrs. Solzhenitsyn wrote in a letter. Her husband was surrounded by Jewish friends in Russia, she said, both in and out of the Gulag.
Another Russian close to Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who insisted on anonymity, said: ”You don’t understand the attitude today of the Russian intelligentsia. Anti-Semitism is held in such contempt now that if a member of the intelligentsia knows you are an anti-Semite, he won’t shake your hand. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t care what people think of him here in the United States. What he cares about is what Russians will think who hear about this on Radio Liberty or the Voice of America.”
Indeed, in one of his two letters, Mr. Solzhenitsyn said: ”My task is to write true historical research on the Russian Revolution, beyond that it’s not so important to me whether my books are accepted precisely in this decade and precisely in this country.”
The expanded version of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s ”August 1914” is to be published in 1986 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
