Abstract
During the years 1978–1982 Shafarevich rewrote many times anew what was to become his most controversial article, Russophobia.He has later admitted that still at that time “it did not even occur to me that this work could be published during my lifetime. [In 1982 or 1983,] after wavering for a long time, we decided with friends to spread it in Samizdat, hoping that out of the dozens of copies at least some would be spared.”
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Notes
- 1.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982].
- 2.
Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a, 172, see also 2004c, 137; 1990a, 89; 2000 [1997]b, 8. He has later thanked in particular Sergei Demushkin and Igor Khokhlushkin: “I cannot say that they helped me: they simply took all the work to themselves. I remember how it seemed like a miracle to me when in 1983, in the atmosphere of general apathy and fearfulness, more and more people told me that a copy of my work Russophobia had reached them.” (Shafarevich 1991e, 555.)
- 3.
Borodin 2003a, 153.
- 4.
Shafarevich 2008a, see also 2010a, 114 for the same story.
- 5.
Shafarevich 2003a.
- 6.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 164.
- 7.
Shafarevich 2000 [1997]b, 8–9; 1994 [1991]a, 173; Dunlop 1994, 24. See also Senderov 1989a; Krakhmalnikova 1990, 166.
- 8.
E. Etkind 1989, 178. Etkind was not the only one to be taken aback when learning that Shafarevich was its author. According to Levin (1996, 346) Sakharov was deeply saddened when “the authorship of the initially anonymous Russophobia was disclosed”.
- 9.
Shafarevich 2003a, see also 2010a, 113. In 1989, in a television interview, Gumilev dubbed Russophobia “a very convincing piece of work”– one “to which I am not able to add anything” (Gumilev 1994 [1989]). Later Shafarevich commented on his acquaintance with this philosopher of Russian ethnogenesis: “I often used to argue about the character of the laws of history with the late Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev”, adding that to his mind Gumilev’s deductions and prognoses went too far. (Shafarevich 1996d, 229–330.)
- 10.
Vagin was a former member of the same underground organisation as Leonid Borodin, VSKhSON. After a long camp sentence he had emigrated to Italy where he edited Veche together with fellow emigrant Oleg Krasovskii who founded the journal in 1981 (for a short description of Veche, see Popov 2004). Apparently Krasovskii was initially against Russophobia’s publication (Bondarenko 1998). Vagin, too, had his first pieces in Veche commenting on Russophobia (i.e., Simanskii 1989 and 1991) published pseudonymously. In his case the intention in doing this was evidently to lend it maximal credence, not to deprive it of his visible support.
- 11.
Shafarevich 2003a; 2000 [1997]b, 9.
- 12.
Nos. 63 and 64.
- 13.
No. 104.
- 14.
The cover of Dvadtsat dva announced “Watch out, Russophobia. The sensational anti-Semitic manifesto of academician I. Shafarevich”, and in Vremia i my the editors spoke about Shafarevich’s text “On Russophobia” which “presents itself as some sort of a historico-philosophical treatise”, specifying that “the major goal which the author set for himself is to show the destructive role of the Jews in the life of Russia and the Russian people.”
- 15.
La setta mondialista contro la Russia, 1990 [by all’Insegna del Veltro].
- 16.
La Russophobie, 1993 [by Edition Chapitre Douze].
- 17.
Rusofobija/Dve staze – ka istom bezdanu, 1993 [by Pogledi].
- 18.
Russophobie: das kleine Volk und die Russen, 1995 [by Verlag der Freunde].
- 19.
Rusofobiia, 2002 [by Zharava].
- 20.
JPRS Report, Soviet Union: Political Affairs (JPRS-UPA-90-015), 1 November, 1989.
- 21.
Shafarevich 1996c.
- 22.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 86–88, 165.
- 23.
Ibid., 88–89.
- 24.
The version in Shafarevich’s collected works still includes some misprints inherited from the samizdat “edition”. (This is explained by the fact that when Shafarevich had decided to “publish Russophobia in Samizdat”, he had hired a typist used by samizdat authors who had typed it and then made some 60 identical copies of it, Shafarevich 2002a, see also 2010a, 113.) The text mentions on two separate occasions the execution of Louis XI (Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 91) and Louis XIV (ibid., 145), neither of whom was executed. Instead, it was the public execution of Louis XVI (1754–1793) by the Jacobins in revolutionary France that was an enormous shock for contemporaneous Europeans.
- 25.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 89–100.
- 26.
Ibid., 100–104.
- 27.
Ibid., 103–104.
- 28.
Ibid., 104–106. This was essentially the question which Solzhenitsyn had asked when debating with “our pluralists”, see Ch. 6.
- 29.
Ibid., 106–107.
- 30.
Yanov 1977, 21, slightly rephrased.
- 31.
Here he refers to Voltaire’s famous saying: “Do you want good laws? Burn yours, and write new ones.”
- 32.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 108–113.
- 33.
The original for these ideas is Cochin 1921, 43–140, in particular, 72–74, 86, 94, 114, 118, 123, 127.
- 34.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 114–120.
- 35.
Shafarevich refers to The Rubble press conference although not mentioning it or himself by name: “In one press conference an idea was expressed that emigration is, after all, not an achievement and that those who leave have torn their spiritual ties with their homeland and, for that sake, are hardly capable of offering a great contribution to its culture. Rebuffs and protests came both in the Western and émigré press and radio.” (Ibid., 124.)
- 36.
Ibid., 120–128.
- 37.
Ibid., 128–131.
- 38.
For this organisation, see Vserossiiskii 1975; Vserossiiskii 2003; Dunlop 1976b. For Ianov’s discussion, see Yanov 1978, 14–16, 21–38.
- 39.
Velikaia Rossiia is a concept usually associated with Petr Stolypin, the Russian pre-revolutionary Premier, who famously said “What we need is great Russia, not great eruptions.”
- 40.
This is Shafarevich’s summary of Ianov’s thoughts, not a direct citation from Ianov’s text.
- 41.
Ibid., 131–132, 133. Shafarevich refers to Yanov 1977.
- 42.
Ibid., 135.
- 43.
Ibid., 136.
- 44.
Ibid., 135–137.
- 45.
Ibid., 138.
- 46.
Bikerman et al. 1978 [1923].
- 47.
He mentions Feliks Svetov’s Open to Me the Doors (Otverzi mi dveri, 1978) and articles by Samuel Hugo Bergman and Dan Levin in the Tel Aviv-based journal Dvadtsat dva in 1978.
- 48.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 138.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid., 138–142.
- 51.
Ibid., 142–151.
- 52.
Here and henceforth when citing the Bible the translations into English are mostly according to the New International Version but occasionally, when another one of the most common translations is more literal or in another way clearly better, I use it.
- 53.
Ibid., 152.
- 54.
Hebrew akum is used in the conceptions pat (or pas) akum, chalav akum, and gevinat akum, i.e., bread, milk or cheese baked, milked or made by a non-Jew. Here a more accurate word would have been goy, i.e., gentile.
- 55.
Ibid., 158, emphasis added.
- 56.
In the coming sections when analysing Russophobia’s ideas I shall return to these immense matters. At this point my task is to present its ideas as truthfully to its text as I can.
- 57.
Ibid., 151–159.
- 58.
I.e., narod. It is just as well translatable as “a people”. Narod denotes the loose, open-ended unit which shares a language, culture, history, religion, territory etc.
- 59.
Ibid., 159–164.
- 60.
Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a.
- 61.
Ibid., 174.
- 62.
See his resumé of Russophobia’s central ideas in ibid., 174.
- 63.
Understood both as a possibility and as a calling.
- 64.
Most notably, Hitler and Italian fascists were keen to depict society as an organism or “a national body”.
- 65.
This is authenticated by the fact that even such a fierce enemy of Nazism as Walter Laqueur has employed the organistic metaphor in his own argumentation: “Like pathogenic bacilli, fascism could be found in every organism. But it could prevail only if the organism was weakened or in some other way predisposed.” (Laqueur 1996, 21.)
- 66.
On several occasions he has illustrated the difficulty embedded in using commonly used concepts with the example that such an ostensibly unambiguous category as “the two-legged” includes both humans and ostriches (see, for instance, Shafarevich 1991h).
- 67.
While there is no sense to attach additional meanings to Shafarevich’s definition at this point, letting them “lead” or “shape” it against his own words which are very explicit, it may be noted that in Russian religious philosophy “organistic” and “mechanistic” is a common conceptual pair, met frequently in the texts of the Landmarks authors, for instance. (See also Riasanovsky 1993; Walicki 1980.)
- 68.
See, for instance, Shafarevich 1994 [1967], 464; 1994 [1973]a, 461; 1994 [1978]b, 15. There are still many more similar instances in his texts which will be at issue in the chapters to come.
- 69.
Shafarevich 2008a.
- 70.
Wistrich 1991, xvi.
- 71.
Ibid., xvi–xvii. Wistrich’s colleague at the Hebrew University, professor of Jewish history (and a rabbi), Robert Bonfil has made the same point: “History is and will always be magistra vitae for Jews and Christians alike, if only it will be responsibly handled so as to perform its healing operation on memory’s traumatic residues by historicizing past anti-Jewish utterances rather than by dangerously projecting them onto the present and the future as if they were invariable over the centuries.” (Bonfil 2004, 374.)
- 72.
The concept was popularised around the 1870s by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr. In his usage it denoted an antagonistic stance towards Jews, their lifestyle and what they represented to him. (Laqueur 2006, 21.)
- 73.
Arendt made this point already in 1951: “If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument. The more surprising aspect of this explanation is that it has been adopted by a great many unbiased historians and by an even greater number of Jews.” (Arendt 1994 [1951], 7.) A prominent exponent of such absurd logic is Wiesel (see, Wiesel 1985a, 376, 380, 381).
- 74.
Somewhat similar thoughts are expressed in Slezkine 2004, 364–367. I shall later return to Slezkin’s significant contribution to these discussions.
- 75.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 140.
- 76.
Shafarevich 1991d, 99, see also a thorough elaboration of this in 1994 [1991]a, 198–206.
- 77.
Since Shafarevich’s point is moral and legitimate, I will from now on avoid using the term “anti-Semitism” as a descriptive attribute in this study, replacing it with a concrete depiction most appropriate in the respective case (e.g., “violence towards Jews motivated by their Jewishness”, “discrimination of Jews due to their Jewishness” or, “irrational prejudices about Jews as a group”).
- 78.
See, Finkelstein 2003, 47–53 and passim.
- 79.
This observation has been made by numerous people. For one occasional example, the Jewish pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim has expressed his fear of both post-Holocaust anti-Semitism and “philo-Semitism, which would be as wrong as anti-Semitism” (Barenboim & Said 2002, 170). Barenboim has also elaborated this in practice. When he was labelled “a real Jew-hater, a real anti-Semite” by Israel’s Education Minister Limor Livnat after having refused an interview to a reporter in the uniform of the Israeli army at a launch of a book he had written together with Edward Said about the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian friendship, Barenboim stated: “Anti-Semitic? What is anti-Semitic about it? When I say that a uniform should be worn to the right places and not to the wrong ones, there is nothing anti-Semitic about it, there is no logic to this claim. […] I just thought that in this place, discussing a book written together with a Palestinian, it shows lack of sensitivity.” (“Minister Livnat denounces”.)
- 80.
The idea of a hypothetical trial is based on the consideration that when assessing whether Russophobia is anti-Semitic or whether such charges should be dropped, it would be necessary that the prosecutor (as well as the defence) gives actual arguments to support his accusation. As is obvious as well, in an actual trial claims like “N. N. does not say this but the reader gets a strong impression…” would not do.
- 81.
Cited in Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 159.
- 82.
The poems by Khaim Nakhman [Chaim Nachman] Bialik cited by Shafarevich are admittedly very bitter and full of expressions of revenge and vocabulary of Hell.
- 83.
Shafarevich had cited in disbelief the poem of the recent emigrant, David Markish, which had started with the words, “I’m speaking of us, sons of Sinai; us with a gaze of a different warmth. May the Russian folk be led by another path, their Slavic things do not concern us. We ate their bread and paid in blood. The scores are kept but not settled. We’ll take revenge, and leave our flowers on the coffin of their northern country.”
- 84.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 157.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Ibid., 138.
- 87.
The question ‘What does Shafarevich then believe in the depths of his heart?’ is already nonsensical. According to all elementary categories of logic and morality, Shafarevich has an inalienable right to be taken as a responsible person who says no more and no less than what he considers required and proper. From all the evidence of Russophobia (and his previous, always most guarded and tactful comments on related themes) it simply seems that he thinks that it is not his business to pretend to the role of a judge. This is more than enough.
- 88.
Biblical exegesis is a discipline professed by Christians, but the works of the best exegetes, such as Veijola (see the previous note) are accepted and respected by their colleagues in Judaic studies.
- 89.
See also Veijola 2004, 176.
- 90.
Throughout this section I will be using the name Israel a little inaccurately, having it refer both to the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.
- 91.
Unfortunately, due to Veijola’s untimely death I am unable to provide other references for this point about the vassal treaties than his lecture course (Veijola 1993) dedicated to the meticulous study of Deuteronomy 6:4–25. There he discussed in great detail the fact that its formulations were identical to those of the vassal treaties, and the implications of this fact. Apparently he never wrote about it although his personal archives must include plenty of material about it.
- 92.
Veijola has again put it aptly: “Already at that time it was a danger of religion that it lulled those professing it into a peacefulness given by a false safety and complacency. The Israelites could start to think that because of God’s choice they were a nation nothing could threaten. The prophets put under question this kind of religiosity that was taken as self-explanatory. According to them their choice signified a responsibility greater than that of other peoples: You only have I chosen of all the families of the earth. Therefore, because of your special calling, I am holding you responsible for all your wrong-doings. (Amos 3:2.)” (Veijola 1990a, 90. See also Veijola, 1982a.)
- 93.
It is not only Veijola or Christian biblical scholars who maintain this. There are no difficulties in finding confirmation of this in contemporary Judaic sources. For instance: “If, however, Israel is the chosen people, it is not for the purpose of receiving special marks of favouritism from God. […] as a result of this choice, Israel bears a heavier responsibility and his liability to punishment is greater.” (Cohen 1975, 60.)
Or: “chosenness has nothing in common with doctrines of ‘racial’ or ethnic superiority. […] chosenness obligates Jews to a higher, not lower, morality.” (Telushkin 1994, 298.)
- 94.
This emphasis is naturally important (as in all study of the history of ideas); making the original initiators of an idea responsible for the unlimited number of interpretations by latter-day interpreters (as if they had no responsibility of their own) would be senseless. I will return to this issue later.
- 95.
Cohen again confirms: “Genuine converts were welcomed and highly esteemed” and “the Israelite and the convert were placed on exactly the same level.” (Cohen 1975, 64.)
- 96.
Ibid., 65.
- 97.
Ibid., 66.
- 98.
Bar Chaim no date. I am thankful to the Moscow scholar Iurii Tabak of the Jewish-Christian Project for acquainting me with Bar Chaim’s article. According to Masalha 2007, 139, 141, the late Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook (as well as his father Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook) has been even more active (and more influential) in promoting such a doctrine.
- 99.
Aron 1990, 338. Of course, the reason for the fact that since those days conversion virtually stopped playing a role in Judaism is that Jews lived for centuries amongst Christian and Muslim communities which forbade conversion to Judaism as a most serious sacrilege. However, the fact that conversion belongs inherently to Judaism is seen in present-day America – which is in some respects a pluralistic society similar to the ancient world – where conversion has again become commonplace.
- 100.
Veijola 1982b.
- 101.
Veijola 1993, see also 1982b.
- 102.
Veijola has pointed out to several other stories of the Old Testament with utterly pacifistic undertones, emphasising that central to it is the idea that any rearmament or hankering for great armies in war is a sign of faithlessness towards God, His betrayal. See, for instance, Isaiah 30:15–16: For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, “If you come back to me and are peaceful, you will be saved. If you will be calm and trust me, you will be strong.” But you were unwilling, and you said, “No! We will flee upon horses”; therefore you shall flee away; and, “We will ride upon swift steeds”; therefore your pursuers shall be swift.
And Hosea 10:13–14: You have planted evil, harvested injustice, and eaten the fruit of your lies. You trusted your own strength and your powerful forces. So war will break out, and your fortresses will be destroyed. Your enemies will do to you what Shalman did to the people of Beth-Arbel – mothers and their children will be beaten to death against rocks. See also Zechariah 4:6; Psalms 33:16–20 and 20:8.
This logic is not foreign to the tradition of Jewish biblical interpretation, midrash, either. According to one midrashic tale angels rejoiced when the Egyptians pursuing their escaped Judaic slaves were drowned in the Red Sea. They were angrily silenced by God: “How dare you be joyful! Don’t you see that my creation is dying.” (Veijola 1993.)
- 103.
The rich material of the Hebrew Bible about the encounter of man and his Creator (to borrow again Veijola’s words) was gathered together and edited by several schools of redactors over several centuries. But ultimately all these redactors, whether formally stressing the priestly function, the primacy of the Law and so forth, remained true to this idea about a covenant of responsibility, and this is also the point made by all scholars of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament who read it with respect to the basic requirements of the history of ideas method.
- 104.
As is often noted, the word “religion” has its root in the Latin religare, to rebind, to reconnect or to be in relation with someone.
- 105.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 152. Langmuir shows that this claim has been made by a wide range of scholars, Jews and non-Jews alike, and far from always for the purpose of compromising Jews (Langmuir 1990, 3–17).
- 106.
Langmuir credits James Parkes, Count Cloudenhove-Kalergi and J. N. Sevenster as the most prominent researchers having pointed this out, ibid.
- 107.
Ibid., 286.
- 108.
Veijola 1993. The only exception concerned moral common sense, i.e., the Israelites reasoned that any god demanding such ceremonies of adoration as temple prostitution had to be an idol.
- 109.
Ibid.
- 110.
The function of both the pillar of Jerusalem as the centre of cultic proceedings and the pillar of Israel as Yahwe’s Chosen People was to support the conception about monotheism because at the time when this so-called cult reform was made, cults of local deities were still common outside of Jerusalem.
- 111.
Veijola 1993. Of course, this phase of the mature Israelite religion to which Deuteronomy attests is only one phase in its evolution. In the oldest tradition of the Hebrew Bible (most notably, much of Genesis 1–11), the idea of One God who is the creator and benefactor of all peoples and all creation prevails. This tradition does not differ from many other ancient creation myths and legends of many other peoples. The “retreat” to more “tribalistic” conceptions, and eventually, the emergence of the conception of “the Chosen People” was basically dictated by the ancient Jews’ realisation that other peoples’ conceptions of the holy were inaccessible to the Jews and vice versa. It was a way to redefine their responsibility to only bother about the purity of “our own hearts”, and not to mix into others’ business. In the most recent texts of the Hebrew Bible, written when the Jews began to be scattered among other peoples around the Mediterranean because of rapidly growing international trade, universalist emphases reappear. Here, too, the perspective is that of Jews’ own responsibility to hold on to universal ethics – not that of arrogantly preaching responsibility to others.
- 112.
Veijola 1998, 218.
- 113.
Ibid., passim; 1990b, passim. For example: Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this. (Deuteronomy 24:17, 19.)
- 114.
Do not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt yourself. (Exodus 22:21.)
Do not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 23:9.)
When a stranger resides with you in your land, do not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33–34.) There are many more of such excerpts.
- 115.
Langmuir 1990, 3–17 and passim.
- 116.
In spite of the fact that Judaism and Christianity can be said to share the same essence, they both have their own “language”, their distinct semantic logic and tradition. Here the metaphor of a family can again be applied: if two couples have married and have started their families, it would be a utopian, anarchic deed bringing with it chaos and grief if they – prodded by their realisations that their two families are essentially so similar – would suddenly merge together under the pretension of sharing absolutely everything and seeing no difference between their old and new family members. However, while they should not become one, they of course should understand each other through their own experiences.
When it comes to Jews converted to Christianity, Father Aleksandr Men summarised the essential well (see, Ch. 6): conversion to Christianity does not need to mean cultural assimilation. Converted Jews do not need to forget their language, Jewish traditional holidays etc. After all, the world is full of Christians holding on to their most diverse national and cultural traditions which do not compromise the Christian faith.
- 117.
This ideology was triggered by the Six-Day War of 1967, discussed in Ch. 5. See, for instance, Halsell 2003; Weber 2005.
- 118.
Veijola 1998, 215, see also 1990b.
- 119.
From a historical perspective it would even seem to make matters much easier if the religious myths and traditions of one people, however much wisdom, truth and beauty they hold, do not become the object of the intense religious interest of others – simply because that easily means their absolutisation in retrospect in another historical and cultural context, petrifying them so that they become something like lifeless idols. Alternatively, it can mean their relativisation, obscuring their own unique context and then, forcing their ideas beyond their limits, against their own intention.
Indeed, there hardly has ever existed a people that would not have had some sort of a personal relation to the Being it considers its creator as accounted in its myths and legends. Usually, in the course of history, it has just been so that nobody else has taken the myths of others overly earnestly, so that they have remained known only to their own people. (If, say, contemporary Finns would continue to consider themselves the sons and daughters of Ukko Ylijumala [the Supreme God and Creator of all the cosmos according to ancient Finnish folk religion, of which the national epic Kalevala is the most famous monument], it would hardly have practical relevance as long as nobody else would bother to care about this.) Or then, they have become the intellectual property of future generations of other peoples – like Greek mythology which became the spiritual heritage of all Europeans – without their sacral dimension.
- 120.
This becomes even more evident when considering the Gospels’ depiction of Pilate in the light of historical facts about him because they show that his contemporaries – Jesus’ adherents and the rest of the Jews – would have had excellent justification for blaming him for everything.
Helen Bond’s study elaborates that Pilate treated Jews much harsher than the Roman rulers before him. His unskilful conduct dangerously shook the equilibrium and was ultimately the reason why the Romans removed him from the post of Prefect of Judea in 36 AD. For instance, whereas Pilate’s predecessors had tried to accommodate Roman rule to the special character of the Judaic faith and had not demanded that the Jews venerate Caesar as god, Pilate had provokingly brought Roman religious symbols to Jerusalem, moved there the headquarters of his army and promptly answered to all popular reactions to these acts with armed force. Bond also argues plausibly that the real-life Pilate certainly wished to eliminate Jesus, a leader of a dangerously compelling rebellious movement, and was hardly indifferent to his death which took place at the beginning of the 30s. Having learnt from his earlier mistakes he knew, however, that it was tactically far wiser for him as a Roman to emphasise his own formal passivity while prodding the high priests to take the initiative to eliminate Jesus. As to the high priests, they were afraid that Jesus’ provocative words about God’s overpowering rulership was a real hazard to the Jews’ relatively autonomous status, giving Pilate an excellent pretext to introduce a harsher regime, and they thus did as he wished. (Bond 1998.) Since all this was doubtlessly well-known among contemporaries, there is a clear theological point in how the Evangelists consciously rendered it harder for the reader to single out Pilate as the guilty one and to thus hopelessly miss the deeper message of the Gospels.
- 121.
The centrality of this conviction for Christianity is expressed in the centrality of the sacrament of Communion, the meaning of which is far from exhausted in remembrance of a historical event of Christ’s life, the last supper. Its main point is that by taking Christ’s mysterious blood and body in the form of bread and wine each Christian acknowledges being part of that mystical unity and interrelatedness (communion) of the cosmos where, on the one hand, all his rejection of goodness is in a mysterious way a transgression against all creation and where, on the other hand, none of his sincere effort to do what is good ever fails to somehow bear fruit.
- 122.
The question about the verity of Shafarevich’s concrete claims as to Jewish revolutionaries is of course still another matter and will be discussed soon.
- 123.
Shafarevich 1990a, 93.
- 124.
David is indeed said to have killed over forty thousand fleeing soldiers in 2 Samuel 10:17–19 and in 1 Chronicles 19:18.
- 125.
Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a, 195.
- 126.
A rather extreme example of such interpretation of religious notions with which a writer operates as with an axiomatic and canonical truth while attempting to maintain a distance from them himself is the way in which the Moscow human rights activist Iurii Tabak criticises Solzhenitsyn. The latter had said, when speaking about Russo-Jewish relations, that “all peoples are children of one God”, on which Tabak commented: “The Lord himself prescribed the Jews in the Scriptures to be to a famous extent isolated from other peoples – something the Orthodox Christian believer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who apparently reads the Bible must accept. For a believer to correct the intention of God means great boldness.” Straight after this Tabak continues, somewhat confusingly, “but these are just small things”. (Tabak 2006, 127.) It is, however, probably more common that ideas of this sort are not explicitly stated but that they just influence the author’s views on unarticulated levels. I will return to this when discussing Russophobia criticisms.
- 127.
Slezkine 2004, 14–15.
- 128.
Ibid., 43.
- 129.
Ibid., 14.
- 130.
Ibid., 111.
- 131.
Ibid., 111–114.
- 132.
Ibid., 23.
- 133.
Baron et al. 1976, 9.
- 134.
For instance, the fierce homilies of St. John Chrysostom (in 4th century Cappadocia), one of the most revered teachers of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, “against the Judaisers” – those Christians who urged their fellow Christians to obey both the Judaic and Christian religious regulations – are well-known (and called in Langmuir 1990, 32 “the most famous Christian virulence against Jews [of the early Christian centuries]”), albeit due to careless translation they were long mistaken to be addressed “against the Jews”. Wilken has likewise pointed out that St. John lived in a society where ancient rhetorical training was highly esteemed and where apologies and criticisms typically followed a certain formula including a standard set of the best of praises and the worst of insults. (Wilken 1983.)
- 135.
Langmuir 1990, 295.
- 136.
Ibid., 262–365.
- 137.
I.e., “service nomads” in Slezkin’s language.
- 138.
Baron et al. 1976, 25.
- 139.
Ibid., 25–34.
- 140.
Boockmann 1991, 163–165.
- 141.
Cohen 1975, 195–196, 228, 385.
- 142.
Baron et al. 1976, 21, 52–54. Such is also the concession made in Deuteronomy 23:19–20 which dates back to the time of the major social catastrophe of the exile.
- 143.
Ibid., 45.
- 144.
Ibid., 45, 59–60.
- 145.
Sutcliffe 2003, 231–232.
- 146.
Jansen et al. 1989, 54–59; Klier 1999, 443.
- 147.
In the sphere of capitalism in particular this was true also for another, younger group of “Mercurians”, the Protestants (Slezkine 2004, 41. Cf. Weber’s studies), and in Russia, for the Old Believers (Slezkine 2004, 111. See also Blackwell 1965; Rieber 1982), whose spectacular success in economic affairs Slezkin’s theory thus plausibly explains as well.
- 148.
Slezkine 2004, 51.
- 149.
Ibid., 40–52.
- 150.
Marx 1978 [1843], 58. Incidentally, in Socialism Shafarevich had referred to these bold conclusions concerning Jews in order to point out that Marx was incorrect in his claims to the point of “almost perverse consistency” (Shafarevich 1994 [1977]a, 271 [English: 206]).
- 151.
See also Slezkine 2004, 60, 63, 79–81, 98.
- 152.
Agursky 1989a, 617.
- 153.
Pale of Settlement.
- 154.
Ibid.
- 155.
Carr 1980, 116; Baron et al. 1976, 68–69.
- 156.
Klier 1995b, 10.
- 157.
Bikerman 1911, 103–126.
- 158.
Ibid., see, in particular, 137–138.
- 159.
Solzhenitsyn 2001b, 62–81, 106–117.
- 160.
Löwe 1978, 33. See also Baron et al. 1976, 55–78.
- 161.
Pipes 2002.
- 162.
Löwe 1978, 199–206. This is also the firm opinion of Klier. He particularly denies these anti-Jewish sentiments’ connection with Russian Orthodoxy, and considers that the anti-Jewish notions of the clergy during this time were decisively secular. They were connected with “new trends which had little to do with religious conceptions of the Jews as deicides and ‘Christ-killers’.” (Klier 1998, 136.)
- 163.
It is heavily based on earlier texts having appeared in France and Germany. It was introduced in Russia under this title at the turn of the twentieth century.
- 164.
Dostoevsky 1994 [1877–1881], 914; Morson 1994, 38.
- 165.
For basic facts about the anti-Jewish pogroms, see Pinkus 1988, 29; Klier & Lambroza 1992.
- 166.
Klier 2000, 30. Klier likewise stresses that contrary to another persistent myth, Jewish mass emigration to America at that time had its reason in demographic and economic pressure due to rapid population growth – not in persecution (ibid., 32–33).
- 167.
Pipes 2002.
- 168.
Ibid. Haberer 1995 concentrates on the Narodnaia volia movement which murdered Alexander II and on the development preceding the murder. The study covers the years 1868–1887.
- 169.
Shukman 1996, 110.
- 170.
Klier 1995a, 153, see, in particular, Haberer 1995, 259–272. Klier refers to Schapiro 1986 [1961], the famous article by the eminent Jewish professor at the London School of Economics.
- 171.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 143. In addition he points out that in the French Revolution Jews had no role. The social layers behind it were the clergy and peasants.
- 172.
The conception was coined by Isaac Deutscher to denote people like himself who were, as he specified, conscientious atheists and internationalists (Deutscher 1968, 51).
- 173.
The “ethic” of the text of the collected works is a misprint (corrected in Russophobia’s later reprints).
- 174.
Ibid., 145.
- 175.
It is an irony of history that even though this is a pre-Enlightenment framework, the Enlightenment in fact cemented its mythic view of Jews as culturally, religiously and ethnically incommensurate, non-relativisable – and as such always potentially threatening. This optical distortion or blind spot in the Enlightenment logic arose from the Enlightenment’s obsessively one-sided rationalism – i.e., its credo of eternal incompatibility of (or even warlike friction between) religion and rationality. This knot of issues is discussed in Ch. 10.
- 176.
Slezkine 2004, 40–104.
- 177.
Ibid., 75.
- 178.
Ibid., 40–104.
- 179.
Ibid., 203.
- 180.
Ibid., 141, 150, 247, see also 96.
- 181.
Ibid., 102–104.
- 182.
Ibid., 70.
- 183.
Cf. “Anti-Semitism was common, but probably no more common than anti-Islamism, antinomadism and anti-Germanism” (ibid., 115). “The official policy [towards Jews] was essentially the same as that toward other ‘aliens’, oscillating as it did between legal separation and various forms of ‘fusion’.” (Ibid., 114, see also 110.) By the side of this statement, the words of Leonard Schapiro, characteristic of the former generation of the specialists of Jews in Russia, may be noted. He had called Russia the “classical home of antisemitism”. (Cited in Spier 1994, 131.)
- 184.
Cf. “As traditional Mercurians dependent on external strangeness and internal cohesion, the majority of Russian Jews continued to live in segregated quarters, speak Yiddish, wear distinctive clothing, observe complex dietary taboos, practice endogamy, and follow a variety of other customs that ensured the preservation of collective memory, autonomy, purity, unity, and a hope for redemption. […] The relations between the majority of Pale Jews and their mostly rural customers followed the usual pattern of Mercurian-Apollonian coexistence. Each side saw the other as unclean, opaque, dangerous, contemptible, and ultimately irrelevant to the communal past and future salvation.” (Slezkine 2004, 105–106.)
- 185.
One of Solzhenitsyn’s Jewish defenders, Roman Rutman, has written in disgust about Gorkii’s “saccharine compliments” for Jews, citing, for instance his words “The Jew is a physical type of higher culture and beauty than the Russians.” (Rutman 1974, 12.)
- 186.
Slezkine 2004, 186. Similar remarks had been made earlier in Margolina 1992, 79–80.
- 187.
Slezkine 2004, 178–180, 236, this concerned later decades as well, see 329–230.
- 188.
The fact of the urban intelligentsia’s indifference to the tragedies of the peasants had already been made by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and many of his writings. He had not mentioned the ethnic aspect of this, however.
- 189.
Slezkine 2004, 310–311.
- 190.
It has also been raised in Margolina 1992 and Agurskii 1980.
- 191.
Simon 1986, 46, 49–50, 77, 80, 139, 140, 305, 311, 375–376, 432, 443, 448.
- 192.
Ibid., 24.
- 193.
Schoch 2004.
- 194.
This was the point Shafarevich had emphasised in The Rubble: all peoples of the Soviet Union were victims in some ways. (He had also emphasised that some sort of reckoning with the past is necessary for them all, but that here no-one should point a finger at others but concentrate first and foremost on repenting for their own wrongs.) At the same time, he had attempted to provide tools for considering the nature of the Soviet strategy in its entirety, and, in this way, for gaining immunity to its dirty play.
- 195.
It is also quite interesting that in 2011 Shafarevich wrote about Slezkin’s book a lengthy review, Shafarevich 2011c. His assessment is not unequivocally positive but he takes Slezkin’s book very seriously, regarding it as an intriguing, stimulating and important study.
- 196.
Slezkine 2004, vii; Schoch 2004.
- 197.
Schoch 2004.
- 198.
This also has a strongest moral dimension because if only the scholarly community had been able to discuss openly the contribution of the Jews to the Russian Revolution already straight after the revolution and above all, to explain it rationally and realistically, the history of Europe might have taken a less tragic course. After all, the horrible plan of the German Nazis to destroy the Jews was, to some extent at least, a thoroughly irrational and hysterical reaction of fear to the prominence of Jews among socialist revolutionaries. The authors of the 1923 collection Russia and the Jews – which has served as the basis for Shafarevich’s and Slezkin’s analyses – were among the few contemporaries to warn against suppressing taboo subjects in order to prevent horribly fatal consequences. Isaak Bikerman, in particular, wrote about this in a profound way (Bikerman 1978 [1923], 11–13). Later similar points have been raised by Sonia [Sonja] Margolina, a German-based Jewish emigrant from the Soviet Union, in her tellingly entitled book The End of Lies. Russia and the Jews in the 20thCentury (Margolina 1992).
- 199.
This utterly peculiar zeitgeist can be authenticated in any memoirs and biographies of contemporaneous influentials as well as in prose, starting with Dostoevskii’s The Possessed and Belyi’s Petersburg.
- 200.
The Yiddish shtetl denotes the typical Jewish provincial township of the Pale.
- 201.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 158. The affinity of this assessment with those later made by Slezkin is considerable. When summing up the Jews’ particular contribution to the revolution Slezkin states, for instance: “There is nothing specific to Russia about any of this, of course – except that the scale was much greater; the transition from the ghetto to the ‘life of all the people in the world’ more abrupt; and the majority of neutral spaces small, barred, or illegal” (Slezkine 2004, 153).
- 202.
Schoch 2004.
- 203.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 136.
- 204.
Ibid.
- 205.
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007.
- 206.
Duncan 2000, 6–17, 141–148.
- 207.
Smith 1992, 7.
- 208.
Reznik 1996, 21. See also Dudakov, who refers to the Third Rome theory when he claims that “the faith in the messianistic predestination of ‘holy Rus’ became a national trait of the Russian character.” (Dudakov 1993, 145.)
- 209.
Like Reznik, Glazov was an émigré of the third wave. In the West he wrote scholarly studies and pieces of journalism as an expert on the Russian mind. However, by no means are ideas like those expressed by Reznik and Glazov characteristic to émigrés only, even if émigrés have admittedly tended to express them in the most categorical terms.
- 210.
Glazov 1985, 223.
- 211.
Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 91.
- 212.
For a discussion about rows over timing, see Korpela 1998, 207.
- 213.
Ibid.
- 214.
A classic which chronicles meticulously these historical realities is Kartashev 1993. On the Russian Church and state in the face of Lithuanian and Polish developments and the ambitions of other neighbours, see also Meyendorff 1988a, 3–17.
- 215.
Sinitsina 1998, passim, most expressly and conclusively 327–328. See also Kudriavtsev 1994, 182 and the sources he cites as well as the emphases of the renowned specialists of Russian church history Ware 1991, 112–119; Florovskii 1988, 10–11; Meyendorff 1988a.
- 216.
On this see also Korpela 1998, 208–209.
- 217.
For this, see also Billington 1970, 73; Kudriavtsev 1994, 186–228.
- 218.
Rowland 1996, 591.
- 219.
Lehtovirta 1999, passim, in particular, 91, 347–561.
- 220.
Ibid., 100.
- 221.
Ibid., 298. See also Meyendorff 1988b, 96–97.
- 222.
Likhachev 1945, 96–101. Lehtovirta has not consulted this study by Likhachev any more than the other studies I use in this section but asserts their conclusions independently, thus adding to the credence of their claims. (In addition, Lehtovirta’s informative and transparent reference system makes it easy to find more in terms of bibliography to rationalise his conclusions.)
- 223.
Nikitin 1998, 32.
- 224.
Tanner 1993, 93.
- 225.
Rowland 1996, 614.
- 226.
Kudriavtsev 1994, 175.
- 227.
Lehtovirta is by no means the only one to do this. Almost all mediaevalists agree with this basic stance. His study is highly usable, nevertheless, since it is extremely well-informed and quite exhaustive.
- 228.
Translatio imperii denoted the idea of transferring Roman imperial power into another historical and political context. Lehtovirta’s conclusions are confirmed by the eminent mediaevalist Uspenskii (1996, 103) and the renowned church historian John Meyendorff (1989, 274).
- 229.
Lehtovirta 1999, passim, in particular, 71–77, 89–112, 290–301.
- 230.
Ibid., 72–73 and his sources; Likhachev 1945, 96–97.
- 231.
Lehtovirta 1999, 72.
- 232.
Ibid., 59–60, 72–73, 290–295. Lehtovirta specifies: “Of course, a reference to the Council of Florence was like a red rag to the Muscovites, being in their eyes the lowest point of the Byzantine fall to heresy, but the popes completely failed to realize this. They were absolutely sure that the Muscovites wanted to get recognition for their assumed imperial role as the successors of Byzantium. The certainty was carried into scholarly literature.” (Ibid., 295.)
- 233.
Ibid., 58–59, 290–301.
- 234.
Ivan III had already adopted the title but was never crowned tsar.
- 235.
Poe 2005, 63.
- 236.
Pipes 1979, 75.
- 237.
Lehtovirta 1999, 72–73. See also Poe 2000, 205, to be discussed soon.
- 238.
Likhachev 1962, 5–20. See also Korpela 1998, 210–211 and the multitude of sources he lists.
- 239.
Likhachev 1962, 5–20.
- 240.
On the long history of the Western Crusades, see Madden 2005.
- 241.
Likhachev 2001, 40.
- 242.
Ibid.
- 243.
Lehtovirta 1999, 71.
- 244.
Rancour-Laferriere 1995, 110–111.
- 245.
Poe 2000, 201.
- 246.
Ibid., 204.
- 247.
Ibid., 220.
- 248.
Among them, Tarkiainen 1986; Scheidegger 1993; Bogatyrev 2002.
- 249.
Poe 2000, 203–204.
- 250.
Ibid., 204–210; more comprehensively in Lehtovirta 1999, in particular, 89–112. Again, Poe and Lehtovirta have not consulted each others’ studies which came out almost concurrently. Nor has Poe consulted Likhachev. He relies fairly exclusively on his primary sources – Western travellers’ accounts of Muscovy.
- 251.
Poe 2000, 213.
- 252.
Ibid., 212, see also 223.
- 253.
Ibid., 216–217.
- 254.
Ibid., 217.
- 255.
Ibid., 226.
- 256.
Likhachev 1962, 7–8.
- 257.
Pipes 1979, 222, see also 225 and 228.
- 258.
Ibid., 227.
- 259.
Ibid., 222.
- 260.
Ibid., 221.
- 261.
This illuminates why Solzhenitsyn was insisting in Repentance and Self-Limitation that repentance had a great role in Russian folk tradition. One of several possible examples that could be mentioned in this connection is that a festive divine service of mutual forgiveness starts the Great Lent before Easter and is followed during the first days of Lent by reading the Canons of Repentance. Even the Russian for “farewell”, proshchai means “forgive me”.
- 262.
- 263.
Sabine’s classic History of Political Theory illuminates what an astonishingly central theme this was to virtually all political thinkers in the West approximately up to the 17th century.
- 264.
Poe 2000, 213.
- 265.
Ibid., 210–211.
- 266.
Ibid., 157–161.
- 267.
Panchenko 1976; Fedotov 1990, 198–209; Kovalevskii 1996 [1902], 143, 146–147. Incidentally, in Orthodox Christianity iurodivyis played a similar role in claiming responsibility and unmasking hypocrisy as the prophets in ancient Judaism.
- 268.
Cf. Pipes’s didactic “[Church in Russia] could have stood up and fought for the most elementary Christian values. […] It should have condemned the massacres of an Ivan IV or, later, of a Stalin. But it did neither (isolated cases apart), behaving as if righting wrongs were none of its concern. No branch of Christianity has shown such callous indifference to social and political injustice.” (Pipes 1979, 244–245.)
- 269.
Kozhinov 1988, 171. Elsewhere Kozhinov additionally refers to the bloody rulership of Charles IX of France, Spain’s Philip II, and ritual murders in the 16th century England (Kozhinov 2001 [1989], 632–634).
- 270.
Panchenko 2005, 69–78. Panchenko shows that Peter essentially followed the advice of the most notable contemporaneous voice of freedom and toleration of religion, an emigrant to Holland, John Locke (whose works were already then translated to Russian): he pacified the Old Believers who were becoming hysterical in the face of excessive repression by granting them certain autonomy while setting them clear limits. He halted the Kievan Jesuits’ attempts to gain a firmer foothold in Russian society and to encourage ruthless treatment of religious adversaries. He was emphatically tolerant of representatives of all religions, and subordinated the church to state control.
- 271.
Incidentally, it ought to be noted that he refrained systematically from calling anybody a “Russophobe” but spoke about a “Russophobic” mode of thought which could be adopted by individuals to a greater or lesser degree.
- 272.
Except for Russkaia mysl, these are all periodicals of the third wave of emigration.
- 273.
Remnick 1990a, see also 1990b.
- 274.
Keller 1990.
- 275.
Many more of them were their publishers, co-authors and colleagues.
- 276.
Senderov 1989a.
- 277.
Senderov 1989b.
- 278.
Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a, 196: “When it became clear that there would be reviews of [my] text, I began to read these with great interest, hoping to find discussion about substance even when the authors would not be entirely agreeing with me. But the result was a complete disappointment.” See also 2003d, 10: “The very character of these reviews surprised me. The great majority of them were critical towards my work. But ‘critical’ by no means in a commonly understood meaning of this word. It was not a refutation of facts presented in it or of its logic of reasoning.”
- 279.
E. Etkind 1989, 173.
- 280.
Ibid., 176, 178.
- 281.
Golomshtok 1989, 197.
- 282.
The journal of Mariia Rozanova and her husband Andrei Siniavskii.
- 283.
Kenzheev 1989.
- 284.
For just one example, see Razh 1993.
- 285.
Khazanov 1989, 131.
- 286.
Pomerants had also entered into a polemical correspondence with Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s, accusing him of unfair depiction of Jews in his prose. He had likewise figured in The Smatterers and Our Pluralists. Unlike most of Shafarevich’s other critics writing in tamizdat journals, Pomerants never emigrated.
- 287.
Pomerants 1989, 96.
- 288.
Ibid., 98.
- 289.
Pomerants 1998 [1996]a, 82.
- 290.
Pomerants 1998 [1996]b, 567.
- 291.
Andreev 1989.
- 292.
Khazanov 1989.
- 293.
Deich 1989.
- 294.
V. Liubarskii 1990, 138.
- 295.
Shturman 1989, 154.
- 296.
Ibid., 147, 145–146.
- 297.
Paramonov 1989, 149.
- 298.
Another piece by him where Shafarevich is put in a curious light is Paramonov 1996, 25: “According to Shafarevich, Jews are notorious villains determined to force their abstract ideological schemes on reality who destroy in the process the organic foundations of nature and society. In this paranoid theory, Jews, whom the biblical tradition treats as ‘the salt of the earth,’ are cast as embodiment of evil, a people collectively responsible for past and present crimes against humanity.” See also Paramonov 1990 and 1992. This list of Paramonov’s works dedicated to Russophobia is not exhaustive.
- 299.
Klier 1990.
- 300.
Ibid.
- 301.
Klier 1995a, 153. By itself, the idea that Shafarevich, the conscientious opponent of revolutions, would have accused somebody of “distorting the ideals of revolution” goes off track. For another starkly biased encapsulation of Russophobia by Klier, see further in this chapter.
- 302.
Kolodnyi 1992 may perhaps be mentioned as an exception.
- 303.
Stratanovskii 1990, 173. Viacheslav Karpov’s early piece in Oktiabr, Karpov 1990, was another earnest attempt of this kind.
- 304.
Shmelev 1990, in particular, 225. On the pages of the distinguished Nationalities Papers John Garrard advises his readers to see Shmelev’s piece “[f]or a thorough dismantling of Shafarevich’s antisemitic diatribe” (Garrard 1991, 144).
- 305.
See, for instance, “Narod zhiv…”; Lobanov 1990, 282: “[Russophobia] evoked an outburst of critical responses – or, in truth, attacks at its author. He was unfoundedly accused of anti-Semitism even if the author of Russophobia had unambiguously explained that ‘the little nation’ […] is not a biological concept and encompasses people of various nationalities, not only Jews.”
- 306.
Shchubacheev 1989b, 157, 155.
- 307.
Shchubacheev 1989a, 68; Pitorin 1989, 6. One more piece in Veche, Kusakov 1989, differed somewhat from this general line in that it was more enthusiastic about Shafarevich’s discussion of the Jewish theme.
- 308.
Simanskii 1989, 143.
- 309.
Ibid., 137.
- 310.
Kozhinov 2005 [1989] 379–380, 381. He continued, “By the way, the concept of ‘the little nation’ is far from new. I could refer to Konstantin Aksakov’s article Narod i publika. [When speaking of ‘the little nation’] I would, instead of Shafarevich, also refer to other antecessors who put the question exactly in this way. Tiutchev, for instance, […] has similar considerations”. And: “I’m stunned how many people now attack Shafarevich, accusing him of deducing certain difficult periods of Russian history from Jewish violence even if it is directly stated in his work that before the end of the 19thcentury Jews played an extremely limited role in the revolutionary movement.”
- 311.
Baranov 2003.
- 312.
Ibid. At least one of Sarnov’s pieces appeared in Sovetskii tsirk (Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a, 197).
- 313.
See, for instance, Lobanov 1990, 282. The nonsensicality of the accusations of anti-Semitism can be felt even in the words of Shafarevich’s persistent sparring partner, Sergei Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza, who is very cold to Shafarevich because of his anti-communism, mentioned that the worst repression this disgraceful Shafarevich, who had always flirted with the West, ever had to endure was that he was nonsensically accused of anti-Semitism after which “his defenders convincingly proved that there is no anti-Semitism whatsoever in his ideas – and so the equilibrium was retained.” (Kara-Murza 2002a, 167.)
- 314.
Cited in Simanskii 1989, 132.
- 315.
Cited in ibid., 145.
- 316.
Ibid., 148–150.
- 317.
Korey 1995, 156; Woll 1997; Murav 1993, 219; Hesli et al. 1994, 809.
- 318.
The only exception was Brun-Zejmis 1996, 170: “Since Shafarevich criticized Siniavskii’s early writings […] as russophobic, it seems both authors were engaged in an old ideological battle.”
- 319.
Sinyavsky 1990a.
- 320.
Sinjawski 1989.
- 321.
Sinyavsky 1990b.
- 322.
On January 9, 1990.
- 323.
Sinyavsky 1990b, 340, 341. In Sinjawski 1989: “His book develops the ideas of German Nazism, of Hitler and Rosenberg.”
- 324.
More than once Shafarevich was then also ridiculed for taking Picasso for a Jew (for just one example, see Shepp & Veklerov 1990b) even if the point of this list had so obviously nothing to do with Jewishness and even if Shafarevich had hardly been thinking about the nationality of these four unlike some of these latter critics reading his text with this somewhat paranoic Jew-tracking mentality.
In fact, in 2011 when writing about Slezkin’s book, Shafarevich says that “Basically it is a sin of me to complain about [Slezkin’s] insufficiently broad view on the nationalities questions in Russia because it was exactly in his book that I learnt many details about Gorkii’s questionnaire on the ‘Jewish problem’ in 1915, or about Mahler, Popper, Lukács or Kafka being Jewish.” (Shafarevich 2011c.)
- 325.
Sinjawski 1989.
- 326.
Sinyavsky 1990b.
- 327.
Bogert 1990.
- 328.
Greenfeld 1990. She wrote further, “One of the most striking phenomena in the Soviet Union today is the vigor of nationalist sentiment […]. In Russia itself, it takes on an unmistakably Slavophile, xenophobic, and menacing form.” Among other contemporaneous pieces by noted scholars in visible Western forums labelling Shafarevich terribly anti-Semitic was Shalin 1990.
- 329.
Remnick 1990a.
- 330.
Sobran 1980.
- 331.
Sobran 1990.
- 332.
Bogert 1990. There were certainly also some other opinions. Steele mentioned in The Guardian that “some sources have suggested that the rumours [about pogroms being planned] may have been started by extremist Jewish groups which are unhappy with the US Congress’s recent decision to deny Soviet Jews refugee status and treat them as economic migrants. Creating a climate of fear could change the US Congress’s mind.” Steele also cited a high Soviet official who had said that some Israeli circles also had such interests because they wanted to “encourage more Jewish emigration”. (Steele 1990.) In this context of the Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union and its not-always-so-well-founded rationale, one may note Pomerants’s statement that “One emigrant presented Russophobia as proof of his right to emigrate to the United States – and was granted refugee status.” (Pomerants 1998 [1996]b, 572.)
- 333.
Berger 1990.
- 334.
Pamiat, 539.
- 335.
Ibid. For whatever other vice Platonov may be accused of, censoring anti-Jewish emphases from Pamiat’s agenda in retrospect to make it seem nicer is not among these: his own entry in the same encyclopaedia (apparently written by himself) states, for instance, that “[Platonov] shows [in his works] that the contemporary Western civilisation is based on the values of the Jewish Talmud and is the antipode of the Christian civilisation[.]” (Platonov Oleg Anatolevich.) See also Platonov’s further phrases cited in this chapter which betray well his fixation with the Jewish issue.
- 336.
The most famous of these demonstrations was action to preserve historical monuments (Midford 1991, 188).
- 337.
Pamiat, 541.
- 338.
Krasnov 1991a, 167.
- 339.
Ibid.
- 340.
Pamiat, 541.
- 341.
Krasnov 1991a, 168.
- 342.
Ibid.
- 343.
Spechler specifies: “Articles criticizing Pamiat’ have appeared in Pravda, Izvestiia, Komsomol’skaia pravda, Sovetskaia kul’tura, Moskovskie novosti, Literaturnaia gazeta, Ogonek, and even Sovietskaia Rossiia, since 1987” (Spechler 1990, n304). She clarifies further that “[Aleksandr] Yakovlev may be responsible for [this] prolonged media campaign against the organization in the summer of 1987 and again in August 1988, as well as for the earlier decision (at the end of 1985) to revoke the organization’s official status.” (Ibid., n295. For a similar claim, see Shchubacheev 1988, 65, which refers to information acquired from Radio Liberty.)
- 344.
Krasnov 1991a, 169.
- 345.
Latynina 1988, 242.
- 346.
Just one excerpt of these is Church 1992.
- 347.
For further elaboration of this aspect, see Krasnov 1991a, 169 as well as the other well-informed articles of high scholarly quality in the same special issue of Nationalities Papers, such as Midford 1991. See also Shchubacheev 1988, 58.
- 348.
Pamiat, 543–544. Ch. 9 will briefly return to this episode.
- 349.
Shafarevich 1990e. Cf. the contemporaneous statement by Dunlop: “Pamiat’ is a fringe phenomenon.” He elaborated: “Pamiat’ is isolated, consciously excluded, and I think we can say that what significance it has is now dwindling.” (Dunlop 1990, 22, 24.)
- 350.
He had replied: “I used to be accused of anti-Sovietism, now it’s anti-Semitism. I don’t really understand either term. They’re vague and propagandistic.” (Shafarevich 1990e.) Of course, Shafarevich was referring to the standard Soviet application of the concept “anti-Sovietism” as the cover-all denigration label, the primary intention of which was to signal ostracism.
- 351.
Shafarevich 1994 [1989]b, 241, see also 239–240; 1994 [1991]b, 319.
- 352.
Pomerants 1989, 96.
- 353.
Shiriaev Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 874. Incidentally, this entry also suggests that the Jewish theme did not figure in the Leningraders’ agenda, at least prominently, because references to it are missing entirely.
- 354.
“Operatsiia ‘Trest’ prodolzhaetsia”, capital letters in the original.
- 355.
In Ostrovskaia’s rendering Shafarevich’s concept “the little nation” was “an instrument of purposeful preparation of the reality of occurrences in Russian history. The ideologeme (a fundamental value-ideological category) ‘russophobia’ construed by Shafarevich was a result of applying this instrument.” (Ostrovskaia 1992, 192.)
- 356.
Ibid., 196. Most of them supported the fourth option that Jews should repent. Ostrovskaia’s article is not unambiguous about whether she had offered to her interviewees ready answers to choose from or whether she grouped their answers herself into these four categories. Her formulations suggest the latter, however (ibid., 194).
- 357.
Ibid., 191.
- 358.
See Ch. 9.
- 359.
Bondarenko 1998. For a similar assessment, according to which “Russophobia is considered by national-patriotic circles as an ideological manifesto of a sort, having established Shafarevich’s role as one of the leaders of the struggle for Russian national renaissance”, see “Istinnyi syn Rossii”.
- 360.
Shafarevich Igor Rostislavovich 2003, 863. For negative appraisals of Shafarevich, see also the gazette Duel. There are also exceptions. See, for instance, Klimov 1989, for an enthusiastic and wildly anti-Jewish reading of Shafarevich’s Russophobia.
- 361.
In addition to the articles cited earlier in this section, Goldanskii 1990 was a prominent example of such warnings.
- 362.
Klier 1998, 129. For similar statements, see Hosking 1998, 1; A. N. Sakharov 1998, 7.
- 363.
Klier 1999, 449–450.
- 364.
Ibid., 143.
- 365.
“[Shafarevich’s] book Russofobiya (1982) gave ammunition to a militant and anti-Semitic nationalism that was influential in the late 1980s and early 1990s[.]” (Boobbyer 2005, 122.)
- 366.
“[Shafarevich’s] treatise attempts to give anti-Semitism a respectable theoretical base.” (Brudny 1998, n328.) And: “[Russophobia] became one of the main ideological documents of the Russian nationalist opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms, and its ideas could be found in virtually every programmatic Russian nationalistic document to appear between the fall of 1989 and the summer of 1991.” (Ibid., 328–329.)
- 367.
“In an unprecedented way, the Soviet public was presented with a theory of Russian antisemitism authored by a world famous mathematician who was a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences […] According to Shafarevich […] many of the representatives of the ‘Small Nation’ betrayed their country of birth by emigrating and joining the international Jewish conspiracy.” (Brun-Zejmis 1996, 169.)
- 368.
“Shafarevich’s anti-communist and anti-Semitic article ‘Russophobia’ [is] a theoretical justification for anti-Semitism” (Cosgrove 2004, 119). “[Shafarevich] claimed that since a people (narod) is instinctively guided by its own self-interest and, since all social forces are based on nationality, forces harmful to the Russian people must be foreign (inorodnyi) in origin. Throughout history the Jewish minority (the Malyi narod), he argued, had nursed a hatred (rusofobiya) of the Russian majority (the Bol’shoi narod), and was the originating force behind so many ills, including communist ideology and the 1917 Revolution.” (Ibid., 31.)
- 369.
“[In Shafarevich,] the professional mathematician with the past of a dissident and ambitions of a dilettante […] it is possible to see the myth of ‘universal Jewish conspiracy’ having reached its normative standard, the entropy which has defined the fruitlessness and meaninglessness of ‘revelations’ based on ‘orthodox [pravoslavnyi, i.e., Orthodox Christian]’ atheism, ‘internationalist’ chauvinism and ‘monarchist’ pluralism.” (Dudakov 1993, 205.) Referring to Russophobia as “Pamiat’s programme” (ibid., 213), Dudakov subsequently claims that “the whole camouflage of polemising with contemporary ‘Russophobes’, was needed for injecting Russian patriotic circles (those which did not yet belong to Pamiat) with Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” (Ibid., 217, italics in original, see also 213–228.)
- 370.
“Jews serve as a scapegoat in Shafarevich’s ‘Russophobia’” (Dunlop 1994, 25).
- 371.
Friedgut 1994. Here and in some of the following instances when I do not present a citation, the claims were made in the most basic form, i.e., ‘Shafarevich/Russophobia is anti-Semitic’.
- 372.
“Dilettante philosophers, like the internationally renowned mathematician Igor Shafarevich, who was connected with the civil movement of the sixties and the seventies, describe the historical fate of Russia as a tragedy caused by subversive powers, by ‘Russophobia’ of dark forces having their origin in the West, in Jewish and Masonic intellectuals, in particular.” (Geyer 1992, 301.)
- 373.
“The anti-Semitic ideologue who gave the concept ‘Russophobia’ its theoretical basis, is the world-famous mathematician Igor Shafarevich” (Hielscher 1991, 71).
- 374.
“Rusofobiya became for Russian national chauvinists of the 1990s what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been a century earlier: an indictment and a ritual exorcism of democratic reformism, an indictment to action and a vindication of bigotry, and a rallying point for xenophobes and the defenders of autocracy.”; “the most original contribution to the literature of prejudice since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”; “arguably the most influential anti-Semitic text since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” “None of the inflammatory diatribes of the official anti-Zionist propaganda ever achieved the notoriety and the influence of Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya.” (Horvath 2005, 6, 151, 174, 237.)
- 375.
As Ch. 1 hinted, Ianov’s preoccupation with Shafarevich’s alleged anti-Semitism is remarkable. He has written about Shafarevich in numerous articles full of colourful characterisations. See, for instance, Ianov 1992: “[Russophobia] is something of a contemporary variant of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, having thus become not only a standard textbook of today’s anti-Semites but Holy Scripture of a kind of ‘brown’ movement in Russia.” Some sort of an ultimate analysis of the devilish Shafarevich appeared in Ianov 1995, 191–200.
- 376.
“[Russophobia’s] author asserts that the Jews, being ‘a small nation’, represent a major evil for modern day Russia. The work lives up to the best traditions of anti-Semitic propaganda, resorting to many old stratagems: accusing the Jews of wanting to control other peoples, for example. The only thing lacking in the book is the accusation that Jews perform ritual murders!” (Katsenelinboigen 1990, 176.)
- 377.
Korey 1995, 156.
- 378.
Kornblatt 1999, 419.
- 379.
“Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya […] contains a new version of the myth of the world Jewish conspiracy and of the Russian people as the victim of this conspiracy”. (Lezov 1992, 46.)
- 380.
“[Shafarevich is] a person possessed with the mania of chauvinism and xenophobia.” (Mann 1993.)
- 381.
“Even if Shafarevich emphasised time after time that his work Russophobia is in no way directed against the Jews but against the Zionists, reading his book shows unequivocally that his argumentations concern Jews as a people and a nation.” (Messmer 1997, 247–248.) “Shafarevich makes no serious effort to hide his hostility towards Jews. […] [He] operates with arguments from the conspiracy theory (‘Judeo-Masonic’, Zionists etc.)”. (Ibid., 249, for similar claims, see also 340, 351, 354.)
- 382.
Michnik 1990.
- 383.
“Shafarevich yearn[s] for originary, authentic identity free from all impurities. […] [F]or [him] [this identity is to be sought] in Russia free of Jews.” And: “The Jew in Shafarevich is sheer demonized Other.” (Murav 1993, 226, 219.)
- 384.
“A decisive contribution to conceptualisation of the theme of the historical guilt and responsibility of Jews was made in the article Russophobia by I. Shafarevich” (Ostrovskaia 1992, 191).
- 385.
“[H]is message was not but a sophisticated version of Pamiat’s rampant conspiracy theory according to which all Russia’s disasters including the revolutions in 1917 were the result of a Jewish plot” (Parland 2005, 214, see also 6, 75, 220). Parland further mentions Shafarevich as a thinker who “resorted to the well-known idea of Judeo-Masonic conspiracy” (ibid., 151, see also 219) and as an example of “[c]ontemporary Russian extreme ethnocentrists” (ibid., 160). In his earlier study, however, Parland took a much less categorical stance and said, for instance, “Unlike most National Patriots, Shafarevich does not […] identify[…] the Jews as the evil force behind all the tragedies that have struck Russia over time.” (Parland 1993, 208.)
- 386.
“Russian anti-Semitism has a long history; in the case of the outbreak of the 1980s, the immediate intellectual roots are […] logically traced to the work of such urban figures as the mathematician Igor Shafarevich”. (Parthé 1992, 125.)
- 387.
Reddaway & Glinski 2001, 107.
- 388.
“[Shafarevich,] the profoundly anti-Semitic nationalist” (Remnick 1998, 303).
- 389.
“Russophobia […] can be regarded only as a calumny against the Jews.” (Resnick 1990, 15.)
- 390.
“Although [Nash sovremennik, which published Russophobia,][…] was overflowing with anti-Semitic materials, Russophobia became an overnight sensation. [Shafarevich’s idea][…] took the notion of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy a giant step forward.” (Reznik 1996, 132–133.) “For Russian fascists, Shafarevich and his Russophobia were a find: the patriotic camp had no people with such high reputations and oeuvre which would exhibit so strikingly and with such sensation the ‘science of hatred’ for Jews. […] [Shafarevich] became a celebrity overnight like a rock ’n’ roll star or a sportsman having won a dozen Olympic medals.” (Reznik 2001, 104.)
- 391.
“[Shafarevich is] notorious for his anti-Semitism and his denunciation of any ‘small people’ that would deny ‘the historical achievements of Russia.’” (Rubenstein 1993.)
- 392.
“As of March 1990, the peak of the anti-Semitic campaign was attained with Nash Sovremennik’s publication About Russophobia, a genuine Soviet version of Mein Kampf” (Shlapentokh 1990, 271).
- 393.
“Igor Shafarevich, the author of Russophobia, and other writings rife with antisemitic notions” (Weinberg 1994, 21).
- 394.
“Shafarevich’s tract, entitled Russophobia (1989), can be taken as the Bible of [the intellectual New Right’s] anti-Western, anti-Socialist and antisemitic gospel, driven by intellectual paranoia and an apocalyptic vision of the spiritual crisis confronting Soviet society.” (Wistrich 1991, 184. Repeated almost verbatim in Wistrich 1993, 17.)
- 395.
Woll 1989, 7; 1997, 434.
- 396.
In addition to the influential American and British dailies already mentioned, the notoriety of Shafarevich was taken notice of in the distinguished Le Monde (“How can a fundamentally anti-Semitic book be today translated and published in France?” [Rérolle 1993]) and Il Giornale (by François Fejtö, in May 1990: “New anti-Semitism, whose prophets are Igor Shafarevich […] and Nina Andreeva […], makes use of the term popularised by Mein Kampf, ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’” [cit. Valdorio 1990, 7. Valdorio also mentions a critical “but nevertheless balanced” Italian review of Russophobia by Vittorio Strada in Corriere della Sera]). In addition to Sinjawski 1989, there was at least one more piece in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (saying that “Igor Shafarevich’s national-conservative ideology further develops the anti-Semitic motive of Lev Gumilev’s teaching” [“Genetiker der Geschichte” 1994]).
- 397.
See many of the citations above.
- 398.
Shafarevich 1990a, 94.
- 399.
A. Voronel 2003, 218. Voronel is also the husband of Nina Voronel criticised by Shafarevich in Russophobia.
- 400.
Ibid., 218–219.
- 401.
Dunlop 1994, 25.
- 402.
Paradoxically enough, even this could be turned against Shafarevich. Ostrovskaia complains that Shafarevich is suffering from lack of logic because he had pointed out that in the French Revolution Jews had not played any visible role (Ostrovskaia 1992, 191).
- 403.
For a forceful emphasis of this, see also Shafarevich’s more recent discussion of Cochin’s conception in his preface to the first Russian edition of Cochin’s Les Sociétés de Pensée et la Démocratie (Shafarevich 2004a) and his talks on the radio about Cochin’s book, including the conception of “the little nation”, (2006b) and about Russophobia (2006a) where the word “Jew” does not figure at all.
- 404.
For one, it has often been used to denote minority nations in Russia/the Soviet Union, e.g., malye narody Sibiri – the little peoples of Siberia.
- 405.
For just some examples of this, see Parland 2005, 6; Kornblatt 1999, 419; Garrard 1991, 144; Korey 1995, 156; Gitelman 1991, 151; Shafarevich 1992i (which is an interview with Agafonov and Rokitianskii). Shafarevich’s sympathisers have, in turn, rebuffed such an admittedly banal interpretation and highlighted that in his usage this concept decisively had no ethnic undertones; see, for instance, Baranov 2003.
- 406.
“Zaochnyi dialog”, 98. Once Shafarevich also snapped at an interviewer of the “patriotic camp”, who insinuated that “the little nation” is Jewish, that “it was absolutely not my attempt to mask the question about Jewish influence (like in the terms ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘Zionists’). I greatly dislike such expressions with dual meanings, and whenever I have wanted to say something about the Jews I have used that word.” (Shafarevich 2000c, 356.) See also 1994 [1991]b, 318 where he said that “if we speak about ‘the little nation’ [of Russophobia], it was formed above all in the circles of the Russian, not Jewish, intelligentsia”.
- 407.
At least in Popovskii 1990 – which was later used as a reference when discussing Shafarevich’s alleged guilt in the mathematics community – Russophobia’s words about “the Chosen People” were cited incorrectly whereby their meaning was flagrantly distorted.
- 408.
Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a.
- 409.
In 2010, Shafarevich again said “To this day I don’t understand why [Russophobia aroused such a scandal]”, and “I was staggered by the fact that all the [lambasting] was as if not about my book. It did not concern the ideas I had said in it.” (Shafarevich 2010a, 111, 112.)
- 410.
Sinyavsky 1990b, 343.
- 411.
Shmelev 1990, 213–214.
- 412.
Lebedeva 1990, 181.
- 413.
Ibid., 181.
- 414.
As was argued earlier, both religions build on the same fundament: the basic experience of Judaism is the experience of the compassion for and solidarity with humans of the Being That Is, Yahwe. This experience of His compassion and solidarity – as incarnated in Christ – is also the fundament of Christian experience. (This seems to be logical also when considering whether Christ could have been conceived as the truth incarnated except for in a sphere where that truth already abided and was recognised.)
- 415.
Shmelev 1990, 215.
- 416.
Lebedeva 1990, 181; Shmelev’s comparison was also criticised by Lobanov 1990, 282.
- 417.
Shmelev 1990, 214.
- 418.
Jacob Katz was an eminent historian of European Jewry and Judaism, the author of such classics as Tradition and Crisis. Jewish Society at the End of Middle Ages and Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Mediaeval and Modern Times. Contrary to Shafarevich’s information Katz did not act as a professor in Tel Aviv even if he had taught there at an early age. He spent his most productive years as a professor and rector at the prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in addition to which he acted as a visiting professor at Harvard, UCLA and Columbia. He is also remembered for having established the history curriculum in Israeli high schools.
- 419.
Uretskii 1990.
- 420.
Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a, 196–197.
- 421.
Zoia Krakhmalnikova was a religious dissident and former political prisoner who had been arrested in 1981 for having disseminated Christian literature (Nikolskii 1990, 163; Kornblatt 1999, 423). She was the wife of Feliks Svetov, Shafarevich’s co-author of The Rubble, whose book Shafarevich had mentioned with respect in Russophobia as an honourable example of Russian Jewish intellectuals’ attempts to consider the Jewish-Russian relations with compassion and honesty.
- 422.
Somewhat astonishingly the eminent John B. Dunlop has dubbed this an “excellent essay”, using her arguments to authenticate Shafarevich’s views as dubious and un-Christian (Dunlop 1994, 28. I shall return to Dunlop’s views in Ch. 10). Krakhmalnikova’s piece is likewise praised in Kholshevnikova 1990. Agurskii, for his part, calls Krakhmalnikova’s piece “well-meant but naive” and “noble” but “misleading” (Agursky 1992, 54). Her article has also interested Kornblatt, who, however, did not concentrate on Shafarevich’s views (Kornblatt 1999). Krakhmalnikova wrote about Shafarevich on other occasions as well, branding him, for instance, “the ideologue of the neo-Nazis” (Krakhmalnikova 1992).
- 423.
Krahmalnikova 1990, 163, 167 [English: 12, 13].
- 424.
Ibid., 173 [English: 21, not followed literally].
- 425.
Most editions of the New Testament indicate Leviticus 19:18 (Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbour as yourself.) as its closest possible equivalent in the Old Testament. That is certainly a far cry from a behest to “hate one’s enemies”. As to the logic of Christ’s words cited by Krakhmalnikova, they apparently referred to the universal logic of callousness which has tended to express itself in every place where the human race has ever abided and not to the spiritual heritage of the Hebrew Bible in an attempt to challenge it. Indeed, immediately before these words Christ famously pointed out that not an iota, not a dot, will disappear from the law until all is accomplished (Matthew 5:17–18).
- 426.
Krakhmalnikova 1990, 177, emphasis in the original [English: 26].
- 427.
Ibid., 177 [English: 25–26].
- 428.
Just one more example of this in Krakhmalnikova’s text is the statement “A Christian believes that nobody can cause either him or the people to which he belongs, harm without God’s will” (ibid., 168). Such straightforward short-circuiting of the problem of theodicy is, however, foreign to the profound tradition of Christianity – and to that of Judaism, for that matter. Alone its implications when considering, say, the horrendous fates of the Jews under Hitler or the peoples of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin are quite staggering.
- 429.
Shafarevich 1991 [1990], 202; 1993 [1990], 15–16; 1994 [1993], 398–401.
- 430.
Kushner 1988.
- 431.
Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a, 202–203.
- 432.
Cit. Shafarevich 1994 [1978–1982], 159. Incidentally, yet another example of the staggeringly unscrupulous way of referring to Russophobia that was so common in reviews and analyses of it was the assertion by A. G. Shabanov – a professional researcher writing in a scholarly publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences – that “Shafarevich explains ‘cruelty, sadism, raping’ to be some sort of eternal ‘characteristics of the Jews’” (Shabanov 1992, 217).
- 433.
“I neither consider it my moral right of any kind nor do I have any wish to even get involved in a simple discussion of the problems [of Russian national self-understanding], reckoning them entirely and fully to belong to the competence of a Russian man. I want only to stress my deep respect for the spiritual beauty and strength of the Russian people, together with my conviction in that it finds its own unique way, worthy of its high spirit, and its place in the universal culture.” “Some of the statements concerning the Russian people which you quoted are indeed disturbing.” “I consider it my duty to say directly that I am ashamed and pained by many of my kinsmen, for their foolishness, tactlessness, and, lastly, for the conscious and unconscious evil deeds committed by them.”
- 434.
“I would have full compassion for your worries, your love of your land and your people, if these originally high emotions would not be darkened by a similarly low hatred for other human beings.” “Your dislike, even hatred of my people (and thus myself as well) is a simple biological fact.” “Total absence of this original capacity [to feel compassion for the suffering of another creature] astonishes most of all in your writing and brings it beyond the limits of scholarly historical study.” “Live long and happily, Igor Rostislavovich, maybe G-d will return to you and puts onto your lips words worthy of your great people and your own intellect and talent.”
- 435.
Kushner 1992.
- 436.
Davis 1990.
- 437.
Laqueur 1990, 25. The same month The Guardian carried Siniavskii’s large article mentioned previously which alerted its readers to the dangerousness of Shafarevich, “a world-class mathematician, a member or professor of several European academies and universities [whose main argument] coincides with the theoreticians of German Nazism, from Hitler to Rosenberg”. (Sinyavsky 1990a. Slightly modified, the same phrases had appeared in his earlier piece in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sinjawski 1989.)
- 438.
Davis 1990.
- 439.
Shepp & Veklerov 1990b.
- 440.
Spector 1992a; Birnbaum 1992.
- 441.
I.e., Zdravkovska 1989, which was cited frequently in Ch. 2. In it Shafarevich had also been asked about Russophobia, characterised by the interviewer as a text which “has now become known in the USA [and] is widely discussed among mathematicians, and occasionally […] provokes sharp disagreements. Some consider it unfair, and even accuse you of anti-Semitism[.]” Shafarevich had answered: “I allow that some places may seem offensive to Jewish national feelings: I know myself that in these cases feelings always speak before logic. But in that paper, I definitely do not say anything similar to the unfounded offensive Russophobic judgments which are extensively quoted therein. The Russians and Jews will have to live together for a long time to come and must learn to listen and discuss each other’s opinions, even if they seem offensive. The most difficult questions are better discussed openly, and not surrounded by prohibitions and taboos.” (Zdravkovska 1989, 28.)
- 442.
Shepp & Veklerov 1990a. For Shepp’s further words about Shafarevich and Russophobia, see Shepp 1990.
- 443.
Kra is named its primus motor in Ewing 1992 and “Otkrytoe pismo”.
- 444.
“An Open Letter to I. R. Shafarevich”.
- 445.
Initially the editors had not agreed to publish the letter. The decision to publish it as a free advertisement had then been made by the American Mathematical Society Council. (Jackson 1999.)
- 446.
“Otkrytoe pismo”.
- 447.
“Shafarevich Responds to Open Letter”.
- 448.
This letter was further quoted in part at least in Spector 1992a and Leary 1992a and included in its entirety in Lang no date. It was quoted in part at least by Spector 1992a and Leary 1992a and included in its entirety in Lang no date.
- 449.
Spector 1992a.
- 450.
“NAS President and Foreign Secretary…”. It, too, spoke of Shafarevich’s “anti-Semitic writings”, his “blatantly anti-Semitic book”, and Russophobia’s “anti-Semitism”. A photocopy of the above letter by Press and Wyngaarden to Shafarevich was attached to this press release.
- 451.
Its readers were informed, for example, that “In an essay published in 1982 [Shafarevich] argued that Jews were responsible for the Bolshevik revolution.” (Leary 1992a.)
- 452.
Recer 1992.
- 453.
For instance, “U.S. Academy Urges…”; “US Academy Urges…”; “Russian Urged to Quit…”.
- 454.
“I. Shafarevichu predlozheno…”; Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 Aug. 1992.
- 455.
Leary 1992b; “Russian Won’t Quit…”.
- 456.
Shafarevich 1992c.
- 457.
This was, of course, a reference to Ronald Reagan’s famous coinage denoting the Soviet Union.
- 458.
Stone 1992; Amato 1992; Mundell 1992; Seltzer 1992; “Academy Asks…”; “Russian Mathematician Decries…”.
- 459.
Spector 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Reznik 1993. See also the brief later references to it in Spector 1993; Hoke 1994.
- 460.
For instance, Leary 1992b stated: “Critics of Dr. Shafarevich say [he] has increasingly become associated with Pamiat, an extremist nationalistic movement in Russia that is known for anti-Semitic sentiments”. See also “Russian Refuses to Quit”; “Russian Mathematician Refuses…”; “Mathematician Refuses to Quit…”.
- 461.
“Shafarevich otkazalsia vyiti…”; Baklanov 1992, 45–46; Borzenko 1992; Sudakova et al. 1992; Rakhaeva 1992; Pokrovskii 1992; Kolodnyi 1992; Mann 1993.
- 462.
Most active in arguing against Shafarevich and in encouraging the NAS to take action against him were the already mentioned NAS member Lawrence Shepp (Spector 1992a and 1992c; Leary 1992a; Seltzer 1992), the Canadian emeritus Lee Lorch (Spector 1992a), Rutgers’ Felix Browder, the chairman of the mathematics section of the NAS (Spector 1992a; 1992c), and Berkeley’s Stephen Smale, an NAS member (Spector 1992c).
- 463.
Its letter to the NAS president Press, signed by its president and chairman of the board, Cyril M. Harris, informs him about a resolution in which its “board of Governors and the Human Rights of Scientist Committee convey […] their support for the […] letter to Y.R. Shaforevich [sic] deploring his anti-Semitic writings (as example – the book Russophobia as translated by the U.S. Department of Commerce [– a reference to the translation by the Joint Publication Research Service].)” (Cited in Spector 1992c.)
- 464.
Its leaders Pamela Cohen and national director Micah Naftalin conveyed to Press their “highest praise for your unprecedented action against Igor Shafarevich”. They stated that “As an intellectual opinion leader and a foremost Russian anti-Semite xenophobe, his voice is inimical to the fragile causes of human rights, freedom and democracy.” (Cited in Birnbaum 1992.)
- 465.
Birman 1993. Birman, a member of its Executive Committee and Council, reported that “At its annual winter meeting, held on Jan. 12, 1993, the AMS passed the following resolution: ‘The Council of the American Mathematical Society expresses its condemnation of the anti-semitic writings of I.R. Shafarevich, as expressed in Russophobia. Dr. Shafarevich has used his highly respected position as an eminent mathematician to give special weight to his words of hatred, which are contrary to fundamental standards of human decency and to the spirit of mathematics and science.” In 1992 Birman had written a Letter to the Editor to The Mathematical Intelligencer expressing her indignation with what she interpreted as its editors’ lack of willingness to publish pieces critical of Russophobia. She had referred to “the all-consuming sickness and distortion and viciousness of Shafarevich’s attack on Jews” and stated that “[Russophobia’s] principal thesis is that Jews (the ‘little people’) have succeeded in penetrating and dominating Russian culture and life as part of a worldwide conspiracy”. (Birman 1992.) The journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Sheldon Axler, had replied to her in the same issue, assuring her that to his mind Russophobia was “utterly unconvincing and offensively anti-Semitic”. He had added, “the book is junk.” (Axler 1992.) Later Axler characterised Russophobia as “badly done history containing a huge dose of anti-Semitism” and said that it “comes to what seemed to be absurd conclusions” (“The Mathematical Intelligencer”).
- 466.
Its letter to Press, signed by its president Ernest Henley, expressed “our support for the principles enunciated in your letter.” (Cited in Spector 1992c.)
- 467.
C. K. Gunsalus, the chairwoman of the AAAS’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, sent to Shafarevich a letter on 1 April 1993 saying: “We wish to express repugnance at and condemnation of your anti-Semitic writings as conveyed in ‘Russophobia.’ Your prestige as an eminent mathematician gives credence and special weight to your singling out one group for special opprobrium... The Committee finds it regrettable that a mathematician of your stature has disseminated such unfounded and vile characterizations in your writings.” (Cited in “To Russia With A Rebuke”.)
- 468.
Being a laureate of the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize and the Wolf Prize, he holds the highest honours in mathematics.
- 469.
Spector 1992a.
- 470.
Serre 1992.
- 471.
Yale’s Serge Lang, an NAS member and Shafarevich’s long-time supporter in times of trouble, was disturbed by Shafarevich’s critics’ flimsy argumentation and by the Academy’s leadership’s high-handedness in sending him the letter – such was also the criticism of Harvard’s David Mumford, another NAS member (Spector 1992a). Lang, who had sent in April 1990 an open letter to Shafarevich criticising Russophobia for “giv[ing] material for others to use in anti-semitic ways”, now circulated a photocopied Shafarevich File (Lang no date) containing Shafarevich’s other writings and pieces related to his dissident activities (published with significant omissions in Lang 1998). Andrey [Andrei] Todorov of Santa Cruz, Shafarevich’s former student (Spector 1992a), and John Tate of the University of Texas, an NAS member (Spector 1992c), also voiced their dislike for the Academy’s move.
- 472.
“Igor Shafarevich vyshel…”.
- 473.
“NAS President and Foreign Secretary…”
- 474.
Wolke 1992. Soon it was cited in Welber 1992 which complemented that “By excluding an otherwise qualified Jew from working with him in the algebra section, Mr. Shafarevich is […].” The text by Wolke, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Pittsburgh, was an Op-Ed piece, Welber’s was a Letter to the Editor. The same allegation was made in yet another Letter to the Editor (Shepp & Veklerov 1992). It had already figured in The New York Times (Leary 1992a and 1992b) and in several mathematical papers.
- 475.
Spector 1992a, to be reconfirmed in Spector 1992c.
- 476.
Cited in Spector 1992a.
- 477.
“I. R. Shafarevich’s Essay ‘Russophobia’”, which cites extensive excerpts of Popovskii 1990, a large interview with Moishezon who says, too, “I literally worshipped Igor Rostislavovich”. Appallingly, in the same piece Moishezon wrongly claimed Shafarevich to have denied the death of the 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust and to have said the number of the victims to be only 600 000. Shafarevich has himself asserted to me that Moishezon’s allegation was based on total misunderstanding of his words: Shafarevich had in fact once noted to Moishezon in their private discussions during a hiking expedition decades ago that in addition to 6 million Jews dead in the Nazi extermination camps the 20th century had seen the extermination of some 60 million people in the Soviet Union. (Shafarevich 2003a.)
- 478.
Schwarz 1999, n305.
- 479.
Cited in Spector 1992a.
- 480.
Shafarevich 1992c.
- 481.
Shafarevich 1992g.
- 482.
Like many fellow mathematicians – Shafarevich among them – Laurent Schwartz was politically active; he was a conscientious Trotskiist. In the 1970s he had written a report on Soviet scientists’ horrendous passivity in the face of the Holocaust, singling out Shafarevich as an honourable exception (see Ch. 6).
- 483.
Guichardet 2003, 173.
- 484.
Schwartz 1993. Some excerpts of the letter were also cited in Mann 1993.
- 485.
Koch 2011, oral information.
- 486.
Shafarevich 2002a. Even later Shafarevich said that back in the days of the Russophobia scandal he had heard a programme in the Russian channel of Radio Liberty in which his former Jewish students had been interviewed. When asked whether they remembered any cases of Shafarevich having torpedoed careers of young Jewish mathematicians, they had said that “they can’t remember even one such case. They could have lied, but my students are honest, decent people.” (2010a, 113.)
- 487.
This becomes clear in an indirect way also on the basis of Tikhomirov 2000, an overview of Moscow mathematics in 1950–1975. Shafarevich’s name comes up in it often, and on very many of these occasions it is mentioned by the side of the names of the most prominent Jewish mathematicians who had either been chosen by him as his students or who were his co-authors and closest colleagues.
- 488.
Birman 1998.
- 489.
Shafarevich 2002b. The only translation known to me is Bulgarian, Zagadka na tri khiliadi godini: istorija na evreistvoto ot gledna tochka na sŭvremenna Rusiia, 2005 [by Vitiaz].
- 490.
Shafarevich 2002b, 5.
- 491.
Solzhenitsyn 2001, 5.
- 492.
Its only known publication is henceforth referred to as Sidorchenko 2000 [1965–1968].
- 493.
Shafarevich 2003a. Here Shafarevich answered in the affirmative to my question whether this had been the case.
- 494.
While its year of publication is given as 2000, it came out – or at least, started to circulate on any notable scale – only in 2001, after the publication of the first volume of Two Hundred Years.
- 495.
Solzhenitsyn 2001c.
- 496.
Solzhenitsyn 2003c. The most light on the vicissitudes of the manuscript before its mysterious appearance has been shed by Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, the late Natalia Reshetovskaia, who, while being far from always the most trustworthy informant as to Solzhenitsyn, may evidently be relied on here. She said that the son of Solzhenitsyn’s friend, the late Nikolai Kobozev (whom, Solzhenitsyn later said, “[I] let […] see my unpublished manuscripts” and trusted “with absolutely any of my texts, and between 1962 and 1969 he was the steadfast guardian of the principal copies of all my major works”. Solzhenitsyn 1997, 27), had sold her “this scholarly work which consisted of some dozens of pages and later grew into the two volumes of Two Hundred Years Together” sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. She further claimed to have deposited it in a secret archive of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) from where it somehow leaked out to Anatolii Sidorchenko, its publisher. (Reshetovskaia’s words are cited in “Tsitatnik dlia semitov i antisemitov”.) As to whether this was already done with Reshetovskaia’s consent or co-operation, remains unclear.
Solzhenitsyn’s scarce comments betray clearly that the manuscript’s publication put him in a most awkward situation. He was reluctant to sue Sidorchenko who, during the Soviet years, had been interned in a psychiatric hospital because of his political views and whose intention, however luckless, had apparently not been to harm Solzhenitsyn. Of course, the procedure of a lawsuit would have also ultimately compelled Solzhenitsyn to speak more about this piece even though its whole rationale would have been to defend his right not to speak about it. However, since the fact of his reluctance to start a lawsuit was bound to be interpreted in some quarters as to mean that he took responsibility for its every word and could consequently be extensively quoted and attacked as its author, Solzhenitsyn chose the only sensible way to protect his elementary right under these conditions: the way of half denying, half not denying his authorship and then, when it could not be denied any longer, of stressing that the published version was heavily distorted, without specifying any further.
- 497.
Solzhenitsyn 2003d. Even though by forcefully distancing himself from The Jews Solzhenitsyn had clearly tried to do his utmost to ensure that it would not give rise to cheap speculation of this sort, it so happened that those few authors who did take a keen interest in it indeed attempted to seal with this “scandal” Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as an anti-Semite, speculating with relish about what they did their best to depict as its compromising details. It also so happened that the most vociferous of them was the very Semen Reznik who had excelled as a “Shafarevich specialist” in connection with the NAS scandal, urging Shafarevich’s foreign colleagues to label him an anti-Semite with whom civilised mathematicians ought not to be dealing, see Reznik 2003a; 2003b. Mark Deich, another alert critic of Russophobia, likewise took best advantage of The Jews in his efforts to compromise Solzhenitsyn (Deich 2003). Their vulture-like approach was then duly criticised by Mikhail Kheifets (cited extensively in Saraskina 2008, 882, original in the Israeli journal Novyi vek, No. 3, 2003). In scholarly literature the incident of the appearance of The Jews has been discussed by Larson (2005) who is a great deal more attentive to the question of Solzhenitsyn’s actual intentions.
- 498.
Sidorchenko 2000 [1965–1968], 3. When citing this piece, it must of course be remembered that this is not an authorised version. However, this is one of the sections which the reader recognises in a rewritten form in Two Hundred Years, in the preface to its first volume cited above.
- 499.
Shafarevich 2002b, 6–7.
- 500.
Ibid., 6.
- 501.
Ibid., 22.
- 502.
Ibid., 15–16.
- 503.
The only exception known to me is Kushner. Shafarevich singled him out with some sympathy as his only opponent to have comprehensible arguments, as was seen.
- 504.
That Shafarevich had been thoroughly shocked and surprised by the reactions to Russophobia comes well across in his Russophobia – Ten Years Later published in 1991 (Shafarevich 1994 [1991]a). He recounts having been flabbergasted by the flow of accusations of anti-Semitism and the entirely irrational tone of most of his critics. Then again, when considering the context and motives of Shafarevich (and Solzhenitsyn) when he was tackling for the first time the subject of Jews, it is perhaps in order to mention still the samizdat book by Veniamin Teush, About the Spiritual History of the Jewish People, Teush 1998 [1972]. Teush, one of the first confidants of Solzhenitsyn, wrote this book in the 1960s, completed it in 1972, and discussed in it the same enormous questions of three-thousand-year-old Jewish history as Shafarevich in his Enigma, also heavily involving religion into this discussion. The noteworthy fact is that Teush’s quotes from the Old Testament were the very same as Shafarevich’s – the only difference was that Teush took them at face value. The general spirit of this book – which was not superficial or malicious but in many ways quite earnest – is encapsulated in its motto, “a Jewish prayer”: “You chose us of all peoples, you loved us and brought us near. You elevated us above all peoples and sanctified us with your commandments. You convened us, oh Lord, to your service, and called us with your Holy and Great name.”
- 505.
Shahak 1994, 103.
- 506.
Ibid., 53, 55–56, 61–64.
- 507.
Wistrich 1991, xvi–xvii. The studies of the eminent Jacob Katz mentioned by Shafarevich in his comment on his correspondence with Shmelev can likewise be consulted. Katz’s Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish–Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (by Oxford University Press, 1961) has also been among the sources of a newer and rather disturbing study, Masalha 2007.
- 508.
Bronner 2009; Schneider 2009. See also Masalha 2007, in particular 135–182. Masalha writes (p. 140): “Since 1967, as several Israeli scholars – including Yehoshafat Harkabi, Yesha[‘a]yahu Leibowitz, Ehud Springzak, Avi[’]ezer Ravitzky and Uriel Tal – have pointed out, militant religious Zionism has become central to Israel’s domestic and foreign policies. Moreover, the relationship between Jewish religion and Zionist state policies has become increasingly more intertwined: a radical fundamentalist theology is deployed in the service of settler colonial policies, and Zionist nationalist policies implement Jewish religious commandments (mitzvot) and Jewish theocracy [Masalha refers to Harkabi]. Furthermore, the Zionist messianic force is inspired by maximalist territorial annexationism [Masalha refers to Lustick, Shaham and Elitzur].”
- 509.
Shahak’s indignant judgement of Martin Buber in particular borders the comical. He complains that Buber has drawn in his works only from the humane, beautiful side of Hasidism and has thus lent this stream of Orthodox Judaism an undeserved aura. (Shahak 1994, 27–28.)
- 510.
Shafarevich 2002b, 30.
- 511.
Ibid., 39–54.
- 512.
Ibid., 118.
- 513.
Ibid., 39–54.
- 514.
Ibid., 288–312.
- 515.
Slezkin, for one, mentions that “Of the seven top ‘oligarchs’ who built huge financial empires on the ruins of the Soviet Union and went on to dominate the Russian economy and media in the Yeltsin era, one (Vladimir Potanin) is the son of a high-ranking Soviet foreign-trade official; the other six (Petr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander Smolensky) are ethnic Jews who made their fortunes out of ‘thin air’.” (Slezkine 2004, 362). For the record, in any other texts where Shafarevich’s subject is the social and economic crisis in Russia in the 1990s, he does not talk about the “Jewish theme”, ignoring it entirely, as will be seen in the next chapter.
- 516.
Elsewhere he had stressed that “in history there is a place for mystery [taina] whereas in a natural scientific tract this word would be inappropriate. But mystery, after all, presupposes in the very meaning of the word that there cannot be an answer, least of all a simple one. Otherwise it would be called differently – ‘a problem’ or ‘a question’.” (Shafarevich 2000c, 360.)
- 517.
Shafarevich 2002b, 354. Much later Shafarevich still published one more “protracted postscript” to The Enigma, 2009e. Here he went clearly further than in his initial work, saying that he had eventually come to the conclusion that it is simply best for the Russians to protect themselves before the Jews, like cows before biting dogs. He also implied that the Jews have a hopeless tendency to consider themselves better than the others which has already virtually ingrained itself in their genes. In terms of any standards of political correctness Shafarevich’s words were certainly unacceptable. In spite of this it seems important to highlight once more what was already said here, in the final section of this chapter: Throughout the years Shafarevich has been the target of an entirely fantastic number of unfair, ofter deeply hurtful and very often entirely nonsensical, malicious and naive expressions of wrath. Many of his most malicious and most persistent critics have underlined that they themselves are Jews. While the conclusion Shafarevich draws here, in Shafarevich 2009e, is certainly not the highest – and while it is in contrast with his own pervasive emphasis of each human’s free will – it is still essentially a defensive, not offensive reaction.
- 518.
Among the reviews of it were Kushner’s long and terribly negative one (Kushner 2003a and 2003b) and the positive ones in Nash sovremennik and Moskva (Vorontsov 2003; G. Iu. Liubarskii 2003).
- 519.
As was mentioned in a footnote in Ch. 4, Vladimir Maksimov found such lack of loyalty entirely appalling. He assumed sourly that Solzhenitsyn had simply calculated the price of such defence as too high. (Maksimov 1994.) Even Kushner has seen Solzhenitsyn’s way of dealing with Shafarevich as reflecting his condescension and insensitivity (Kushner 2004).
- 520.
Solzhenitsyn 2003b, 49.
- 521.
Shafarevich 2005b, 206.
- 522.
Shafarevich 2008b.
- 523.
This interpretation is very prominent in Dunlop 1994. See also Shturman 1989.
- 524.
Shafarevich 2008a.
- 525.
Rakhaeva 1992. Saying that Solzhenitsyn has “in no way reacted to the anti-Semitic, or more exactly, chauvinistic statements by Shafarevich”, Rakhaeva assumes that he thus wanted to make clear that he did not see any need to add anything to the “more than flattering portrait of Shafarevich” in The Calf.
- 526.
Vladimir Voinovich, an emigrant of the third wave who has excelled in satirically “exposing” Solzhenitsyn, informs his readers: “Among the most cherished of [Solzhenitsyn’s] friends, to whom he has dedicated the highest compliments, is Igor Shafarevich. Not only an anti-Semite but a vicious one, this kind is called zoological”. (Voinovich 2002, 60.)
- 527.
In addition to his words quoted earlier in this study saying that Shafarevich was “developing one of Solzhenitsyn’s ideas” in Russophobia (Sinyavsky 1990a), Siniavskii elaborated in another piece that “It is embittering to have to acknowledge that the great authority of Solzhenitzyn stands behind Shafarevich. […] The very term Russophobia was introduced by Solzhenitzyn himself; in a 1983 press conference, he said that the leading views of Western public opinion have been influenced over decades in the direction of anti-Russian sentiments. Solzhenitzyn’s views appeared in his work Our Pluralists, not yet published in English but available in France. In this work, he characterizes support of pluralism as Russophobic[.] [As was seen in Ch. 6, this depiction of Solzhenitsyn’s view by Siniavskii had nothing to do with Solzhenitsyn’s actual idea and may thus be reasonably characterised as slanderous. K. B.] […] Solzhenitzyn does not go as far as Shafarevich in linking all Russian disasters with the Jews, but it might be said that he prepared the ground for the growth of Shafarevich’s views.” (Sinyavsky 1990b, 342–343.)
And so, soon after this it was stated in The New York Times that “A leading figure in the Russian nationalist, anti-Jewish movement is Igor Shafarevich, a close friend of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Shafarevich, following Solzhenitsyn’s example, has popularized the term ‘Russophobe’ as a codeword for Jews.” (Garrard & Garrard 1990.)
- 528.
Pomerants has written several texts where he disparages Solzhenitsyn for coldness towards Jews, with staggeringly flimsy arguments (Pomerants 1990 [1970s]; 1990a; 1994 [1985], see also 1995 [1985/1987]).
- 529.
Pomerants 1990a, 35–36. Another self-declared specialist to make the cheap and untrue quip that “Shafarevich boasts of being Solzhenitsyn’s friend” was Fejtö, writing in Il Giornale in an article entitled “The USSR: anti-Semitism is a bestseller” (cited in a disapproving tone in Valdorio 1991, 7, 9).
- 530.
Josephine Woll gauged that “Today Shafarevich’s relationship with Solzhenitsyn enhances his status, regardless of whether he is, as some critics charge, a mouthpiece for Solzhenitsyn, articulating views Solzhenitsyn holds but is reluctant to espouse publically.” (Woll 1997, 434.) Another scholar, Ulrich M. Schmid, reminded readers of a major Swiss daily that Shafarevich, Solzhenitsyn’s old friend, had written an “anti-Semitic pamphlet […] where he interpreted the October Revolution as a Jewish conspiracy against the Russian people” (Schmid 2003). This was also Schmid’s argument in another piece where he stressed that this suspicious Shafarevich was the one whom Solzhenitsyn had characterised as his close friend and with whom he shared the same view about Russia’s future (Schmid 2001).
- 531.
Thus, Golczewski and Pickhan claimed that Solzhenitsyn’s mentioning (in his historical novel Lenin in Zurich) of bourgeois bankers having supported Lenin “suggested (without Solzhenitsyn ever explicitly referring to it) a constellation of the notorious conspiracy thesis of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The fact that this is not just some vicious accusation was exhibited by Solzhenitsyn’s companion, the mathematician Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich, who described in his pamphlet the West’s alleged fear and hatred of the Russians, ‘Russophobia’, and maintained that it was enhanced by an elitist materialistic ‘little people’ living in the middle of a ‘big people’.” (Golczewski & Pickhan 1998, 101.)
- 532.
Seltzer 1992.
- 533.
Pipes 2002. Another eminent specialist, John Klier, likewise unequivocally liberated Solzhenitsyn of the charge of anti-Semitism (Klier 2002). Both were rather critical of the book in other respects, complaining, in particular, that Solzhenitsyn had not used the most recent Western scholarly studies but had relied on primary sources such as Soviet and Russian newspapers of the period of his study and the large pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopaedia in Russian.
- 534.
“I absolutely did not expect such a distortion […] that the breaking away of the Jews from Bolshevism would happen together with them turning furiously against the Russian people; claiming that it was the Russians who ruined the democracy in Russia, that it is the Russians who are the guilty ones and that it was their power which has been reigning ever since 1918.” (Solzhenitsyn 2002, 454.)
- 535.
Solzhenitsyn 1995 [1980]a, 337.
- 536.
Cited in Solzhenitsyn 2002, 466. Khazanov’s text had appeared in Vremia i my, No. 69, 1982. It can certainly be said that in his text Solzhenitsyn also provides tools for understanding Russophobia because he substantiates Shafarevich’s criticism on some such occasions in which Shafarevich had contented himself to rather sweeping words. This is true in particular for Solzhenitsyn’s thorough and most intelligible explanation as to why he was irritated and hurt by Aleksandr Galich whom Shafarevich had identified as an important opinion-maker of Russophobic ideas without stating his reasons to this characterisation very explicitly (Solzhenitsyn 2002, 448–453).
- 537.
For this emphasis, see also Shafarevich 2000c, 355; 2008a.
- 538.
In particular, Our Pluralists and his Foreign Affairs article. It is thus not surprising that Anishchenko (1988) has referred to Solzhenitsyn’s Our Pluralists as a parallel project to Russophobia. Then, much later, a collection of documents about the revolution in Russia and the Jews (Serebrennikov 1995) appeared in a series of studies on Russian history Solzhenitsyn had initiated.
- 539.
Shafarevich 1994 [1989]a.
- 540.
Shafarevich 1994 [1990]a.
- 541.
Shafarevich 1994 [1989]a, 249.
- 542.
As was already mentioned, Shafarevich has said that Solzhenitsyn had not been content with Russophobia, and the reason was that Solzhenitsyn had considered it improper to tamper with religion (Shafarevich 2008a). Solzhenitsyn also hinted this himself in an interview when he said that he was criticised by Russian nationalists because in his Two Hundred Years he did not discuss the Judaic religion in a critical tone (Solzhenitsyn 2004).
- 543.
Shafarevich 1990b, 11, see also 1994 [1991]b, 317 and the quote from Russophobia on p. 245 of the present study.
- 544.
Solzhenitsyn 2002, 445, 468.
- 545.
Slezkin 2004, 360–361.
- 546.
Schoch 2004.
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Berglund, K. (2012). Russophobia. In: The Vexing Case of Igor Shafarevich, a Russian Political Thinker. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0215-4_8
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