SOLZHENITSYN AND SHAFAREVICH
Solzhenitsyn never to my knowledge refers to Russophobia. Nonetheless I think this provides the context for his decision to write Two Centuries Together. Himself already accused, as we have seen, on relatively weak grounds, of anti-semitism, his closest associate had now blurted out a much more aggressive critique of the role of Jews in Russian and Soviet culture, a critique that covered much the same ground, aiming at the same targets, as his own criticisms of the third emigration. Berglund (p.358) quotes both Pomeranz and Andrei Sinyavsky as saying that Shafarevich was revealing Solzhenitsyn's true thought. The article by John Klier begins by saying 'Andrei Sinyavsky may dismiss his [Shafarevich's] ideas as ‘ridiculous’ and suggest that he has no significance except as a stalking-horse for the ideas of Solzhenitsyn'.
I may not have said enough in earlier articles about Sinyavsky. He was arrested in 1965 together with Yuri Daniel accused of publishing 'anti-Soviet lampoons' abroad. The protest against their trials and conviction in 1966 is often seen as the beginning of the dissident movement. Sinyavsky was not himself Jewish but wrote under the Jewish pseudonym Abram Terz and in his period in the camps he was particularly struck by the intensity of anti-Jewish feeling among his Russian fellow prisoners. His essay 'The Literary process in Russia' published in the emigré journal Kontinent in 1974, included the words (talking about the third emigration): 'one day, Mother Russia, you bitch, you will have to answer for these children of yours, whom you brought up and then shamefully flung onto the rubbish heap.' Both Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich saw him as an archetypal example of 'Russophobia'. Shafarevich, it might be noted, first appeared as a sympathiser with the dissident movement when he signed a collective letter in support of 'the four', imprisoned for supporting Sinyavsky and Daniel. The four included Alexander Ginzburg, who became the manager of Solzhenitsyn's 'Russian social fund' supporting political prisoners. Shafarevich was much more involved with the mainstream dissident and human rights movement in the Soviet Union than Solzhenitsyn, who tended to keep himself apart, concentrated as he was on his ambitious writing projects.
Obviously Solzhenitsyn felt the nettle had to be grasped and that he was well placed to do it because of the wealth of material he had already assembled for The Red Wheel. But Berglund quotes Shafarevich saying Solzhenitsyn had written an essay on 'The Jews in the Soviet Union and the Future of Russia' while he was still in the Soviet Union. She says the manuscript was discovered and published against his wishes. An article on the internet, 'The anti-Semitism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn' by Cathy Young, includes the following:
'An even more devastating critique of Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre appeared in the U.S.-based Russian Jewish weekly Vestnik. The author, émigré journalist Semyon Reznik, analyzes a curious work self-published in Moscow in 2000 by one Anatoly Sidorchenko, a collection that includes two essays by Sidorchenko himself and one attributed to Solzhenitsyn, 'Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia.'
'In a June 2000 interview in Moscow News, Solzhenitsyn dismissed the publication as "a vile stunt by a mentally ill person." Yet he failed to explicitly disavow his authorship -- and a comparison between the essay (dated 1968) and Two Hundred Years Together reveals astonishing similarities, including entire paragraphs that are virtually identical.' (7)
(7) Berglund (pp.349-50) and http://www.controversyofzion.info/Solzhenitsyn_on_jews.htm Cathy Young is a journalist associated with the Boston Globe. Although she is writing from a pro-Zionist perspective, Controversy of Zion.info is an anti-Zionist, 'revisionist' website. Young's original article was published in Reason, 36.1 (May 2004), pp.20-25. Reznik is the author of a collection of essays in Russian: Seduction by hate: blood libel slander in Russia, Moscow-Jerusalem, Daat-Zanie, 2001). See Zinaida Gimpelevich: 'Dimensional spaces in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol 18, No3/4 (September-December 2006), pp.298-300.