I haven't read the book, but Arno Lustiger, a German historian, who has written a book about Stalin and the Jews (available in English) criticized Solzhenitsyn's book for being rather unscholarly as well as antisemitic. Among other things, Lustiger accuses the author of text manipulations and of having used sources very selectively. Solzhenitsyn does not use primary sources such as the statements made by the victims, and he doesn't consult key works such as Die Judenprogrome in Rußland (Cologne, 1909) or the conference volume Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, (1992),ed. by Klier/Lambroza.
So apparently the approach is very biased.
In his review (from June 2002) Lustiger even asks the rhetorical question whether S. would like it if the history of the GULag had been written by Soviet civil servants.
I think Lustiger's charges are deeply unfair and reflect the bias many Western liberals feel towards Solzhenitsyn, because he has fiercely criticized the West for being over-materialistic and obsessed with legalisms. The accusation that Solzhenitsyn is anti-Semitic is an old KGB canard and has never had any basis in fact whatsoever. (The KGB, in addition to spreading rumors back in the 1970s that Solzhenitsyn was anti-Semitic, also claimed that he was a stool pigeon in the camps - and understand, this was in the midst of attempting to assassinate him with poison, as the recently opened KGB archives show. They were simply terrified of what would happen when
Gulag Archipelago was published in the West.) Just to start with the most obvious fact, Solzhenitsyn's wife, who is his first and most important critic, is the daughter of a Jew. I also personally know a man who happens to be Jewish and an old and very devoted friend of Solzhenitsyn from their days in the Gulag together. He has expended much energy in recent years in defending Solzhenitsyn from just such charges.
It's true that Solzhenitsyn's work on the Russian Jews is not one of his best - it's very dry and factual (which is why I perhaps mistakenly called it "scholarly") and seemingly lacking in inspiration, and he only consults Soviet and Russian sources. But this is a problem not just with Solzhenitsyn but with much of Russian research in the humanities in general, which still suffers from some of the parochialism of the Soviet era, when scholars were cut off in large part from Western critical sources. All I can say is, at least he made the effort. If some Russian Jew wants to write a history of the Russian Jews and the Russian Orthodox, then all power to him. But Solzhenitsyn attempted it first, and deserves credit, not opprobrium, for such a pioneering effort in Russia.
Give the man a break, anyway, he was born in 1918! He belongs to a generation that has all but left us entirely. He's written half a dozen immortal books and deserves better than to be continually attacked in the press for being "anti-Semitic," "anti-Western," etc. Personally, I think a lot of the criticism stems from professional envy, plain and simple. Solzhenitsyn, because of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and
Gulag Archipelago, will live forever not only as a great writer but also as a historical figure, unlike all these critics and writers who attack his reputation in the basest possible way.
