The Chosen Path

Similarities between Russia in the period leading up to the genocide of 66 million Russian Christians and the US in 2023 are too striking to ignore

In the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the preferential treatment Jewish prisoners received over the other prisoners in the gulags. He wrote that Jewish inmates were the ones selected for the coveted positions working in the kitchens, the laundries, and so on. This was because, he said, when Jews in the prison’s administration saw the suffering of a Jewish prisoner, they saw the suffering of a fellow Jew. By comparison, when the stupid-head Russians (and, as I recall,“stupid-head” was the exact term used) working in the prison saw the suffering of a Russian prisoner, instead of seeing the suffering of a fellow Russian, they saw the suffering of an “enemy of the people.” One group placed kinship over ideology. The other placed ideology over kinship. Guess which group suffered history’s bloodiest genocide?

I was sitting in a bar in Beijing during the 1996 Olympics and the bar’s televisions were showing a tennis match between a German and a Japanese. Everyone in the place was Chinese and they were all rooting vigorously for the Japanese player. Finally, I asked my Chinese friends, “What gives? I thought you guys hated the Japanese.”

“Oh, we do,” came the reply. “But the Japanese is closer to us than the German.” The Chinese are admirably blunt on racial matters and I was forced to admit to myself that I had been rooting for the German for the same reason they were rooting for the Japanese, but secretly—guiltily hiding my racially motivated partiality for the German player. Here was something to ponder, indeed. The Chinese partiality for the Japanese player was racially motivated, as they themselves explained it, and therefore racist. But it didn’t seem evil. So why did mine for the German? It took me a few years to work it all out, but I finally realized it was because I was a stupid-head.

The universal human instinct to favor those closest to us was upended in the United States by a powerful ideology that stigmatized favoring one’s own race. But the stigma was applied only to white gentiles. In the endless morality plays we all grew up watching on TV, in the movies, and elsewhere, the moral was always presented in terms of white gentiles as the racist villains. The lone exception I can think of, 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues, which was written, produced, and directed by Spike Lee, is the exception that proves the rule. The only two white men with speaking parts in the film, racist Brooklyn sharks unscrupulously exploiting black talent, were cast as Jews. As a consequence of the outrage over that negative portrayal of Jews, Lee was eventually reduced to writing an apology editorial for the New York Times, which gave it the title, “I Am Not an Anti-Semite.”

But the ideological goal posts kept moving for the white team. Today, the highest virtue under the ideology of antiracism for whites in the US is no longer simply refraining from favoring one’s own, it requires disfavoring one’s own for the benefit of the other and there are millions of white stupid-heads in the country who can be brought into the streets to demonstrate publicly this virtue—their willingness to place ideology above kinship.

Who cares about justice for Derek Chauvin?

Epidemic-level stupid-headedness among the common people isn’t the only similarity between Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century and the United States today. The ideological climates mirror each other in other ways as well. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes that on the Russian side during the period leading up to WWI: (all quotes below are from 200 Years Together, Chapter 11)

Our intelligentsia was so generous, so freedom‐loving, that it ostracised anti‐Semitism from society and humanity; moreover, anyone who did not give his frank and unyielding support to the struggle for equal rights of the Jews, who did not make it a priority, was considered a “despicable anti‐Semite.” …it forbade itself and forbade anyone to show any trace of a shadow of criticism of the conduct of any Jew in particular…¹

It wasn’t just the opposition. The whole mass of middle‐class civil servants trembled at the idea of sounding “non‐progressive.” You had to be independently wealthy, or possess a remarkable freedom of mind, to have the courage to withstand the pressure of public opinion. Among the legal or scientific communities, or in the arts, ostracism immediately struck anyone who moved away from this magnetic field.²

Just like cancel culture, or the corporate embrace of BLM. And what was the source of what is, after all, an extreme aberration in human behavior?

A contemporary [late 20th Century] Jewish writer analyses this phenomenon objectively and lucidly: “We assisted to a profound transformation of the minds of the cultivated Russians who, unfortunately, took to heart the Jewish problem much more greatly than might have been expected… Compassion for the Jews was transformed into an imperative almost as categorical as the formula ‘God, the Tsar, the Fatherland’”; as for the Jews, “they took advantage of this profession of faith according to their degree of cynicism.”³

The interests of the Russians had become secondary under this new “profession of faith.”

In the 20s, V. Choulguine summed it up as follows: “At that time [a quarter of a century before the revolution], the Jews had taken control of the political life of the country… The brain of the nation (if we except the government and the circles close to it) found itself in the hands of the Jews and was accustomed to think according to their directives.” “Despite all the ‘restrictions’ on their rights, the Jews had taken possession of the soul of the Russian people.”⁴

A polemic took place in the Russian newspapers in 1909 that provides a sense of the climate. Make a few substitutions like “white nationalism” for “Russian nationalism” and the following wouldn’t look out of place on any cable news panel discussion.

A Jewish writer named Jabotinsky published a text entitled “Asemitism” in the Russian newspaper, Slovo, on March 9, 1909:

…stating his fears and his indignation… that even a great liberal newspaper (he was referring to the Russian News) had not published a word for twenty‐five years on “the atrocious persecutions suffered by the Jewish people… Since then the law of silence has been regarded as the latest trend by progressive philo‐Semites.…” “The problem is that the Jews have become a veritable taboo that forbids the most trivial criticism, and that it is they who are the big losers in the affair.”⁵

Jabotinsky’s article drew a large response from Russians. One Russian writer, responding to Jabotinsky, explained that the reason Jews suffered the persecution of not being criticized was because the Russian intelligentsia was stuggling to come to grips with its own questions on nationality in the wake of the 1905 revolution. Another Russian named Struve responded with a bit more defiance:

…but ‘political’ equity does not require from us ‘national’ indifference. …The Russian intelligentsia has always regarded the Jews as Russians… The deliberate initiative of rejecting Russian culture and asserting Jewish ‘national’ singularity does not belong to the Russian intelligentsia, but to this movement known as Zionism… I do not feel any sympathy for Zionism, but I understand that the problem of ‘Jewish’ nationality does indeed exist, and even poses itself more and more… We must not deceive [our national feeling] or hide our faces… I have a right, like any Russian, to these feelings…⁶

I have a right to root for the German over the Japanese. I have a right to come to the aid of the white woman first.

A Jewish writer named Milyukov responded in another newspaper to Struve that Jabotinsky:

…has succeeded in breaking the wall of silence, and all the frightening and threatening things that the progressive press and the intelligentsia had sought to hide from the Jews now appear in their true dimension. …the slippery slope of æsthetic nationalism will precipitate the intelligentsia towards its degeneration, towards a true tribal chauvinism” engendered “in the putrid atmosphere of the reaction reigning over today’s society.”⁷

The Russians were held in an ideological vise from which there was no escape. As in the United States today, there was a taboo on any criticism at all of Jewish behavior—or asserting, in the US, anyway, there even is such a thing as “Jewish behavior.”

But in Russia, according to Milyukov, even this “wall of silence” was persecution and merely a ruse to hide the tribal chauvinism that was part of the “putrid atmosphere” of Russian society. For Jabotinsky, too, the silence was persecution of the Jews because it failed to discuss past persecution of the Jews.

In the United States, the complete silence regarding Jewish behavior has not prevented the ADL from announcing a few weeks ago, just as the Biden Administration rolled out a nationwide campaign to “fight anti-Semitism” (apparently bigotry against everyone else is still okay), that the US is in the middle of yet another anti-Semitism crisis, with anti-Semitic incidents in the United States soaring to record-breaking levels for the 133rd year in a row. In Florida, the wall of silence is enforced by law. A new law, which Governor Ron DeSantis flew to Israel to sign, makes it a third degree felony to blame Jews for what Jews do.

In other words, the absence of persecution is not the absence of persecution. That is the ideological vise from which there is no escape.

But the position of the Jew, whose role it is to tighten the vise, is even more dispiriting and hopeless. Not to play the role means not to be a Jew and it is far less wrenching to change one’s ideology than one’s cultural identity.

Solzhenitsyn wraps up Chapter 11 of 200 Years Together:

In the nineteenth century already, and a fortiori at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian intelligentsia felt that it was at a high level of global consciousness… As for the Jewish intelligentsia, it did not deny its national identity… At the same time, there was no voice among the Jews…to say that the Russian intelligentsia, who supported their persecuted brothers with all their souls, might not give up his own national feeling. Equity would have required it. But no one perceived this disparity: under the notion of equality of rights, the Jews understood something more.

Thus, the Russian intelligentsia, solitary, took the road to the future.

…The power of [the Jews’] development, their energy, their talent penetrated the consciousness of Russian society… We had adopted their vision of our history and how to get out of it.

Understanding this is much more important than calculating the percentage of Jews who… participated in Bolshevik power.

Drawings from the Gulag, Danzig Baldaev, A member of the Russian intelligentsia is tortured to death by having a red hot iron inserted into his rectum.

1. 200 Years Together, A. Solzhenitsyn, Chapter 11, Jews and Russians before the First World War: The Growing Awareness

2. Ibid.

3. A. Voronel, in “22”: Obchtchestvenno‐polititcheski i literatourny newspaper Ivreiskoi intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izrailie, Tel Aviv, 1986, no. 50, pp. 156‒157.]

4. V. V. Choulguine, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa…”: Ob antisemitzme v Rossii (“What we do not like about them…” On anti‐Semitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, pp. 58, 75.

5. Vl. Jabotinsky, Asemitizm (Asemitism), in Slovo, SPb., 1909, 9 (22) March, p. 2; See also: [Sb.] Felietony, pp. 77‒83.

6. P. Struve, Intelligentsia i natsionalnoïe litso, Slovo, 1909, 10 (23) March, p. 2.

7. P. Milyukov, Natsionalizm protiv natsionalizma (Nationalism Against Nationalism), Retch, 19O9, 11 (24) March, p. 2.