Word: czarists
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...diatribe against him, the official Soviet news agency Tass made no attempt to counter Solzhenitsyn's harrowing documentation. Instead, the agency wrongly quoted the author as writing that the Czarist regime was "liberal and loving," and Nazi rule "gracious and merciful," in contrast with the Soviet treatment of its people. Then, a nationwide TV program accused him of "malicious slander." The attacks seemed to presage yet another massive Soviet press campaign against the persecuted Nobel-prizewinning writer. Still, Tass did stop short of calling for Solzhenitsyn's arrest...
Gulag also recounts the better-known horrors of the Stalin era while adding some sensational disclosures and intimations. Solzhenitsyn suggests, for example, that Stalin was an undercover agent of the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) in the disguise of a Bolshevik revolutionary-thus reinforcing the suspicions of several Western scholars. Gulag also says that Stalin planned a large-scale "massacre" of Jews that was thwarted by his death in 1953. In that year the arrest of several Jewish physicians, accused of plotting to assassinate high government officials, unleashed a wave of antiSemitism...
Equally inflammatory, from the Soviet point of view, are Solzhenitsyn's meticulously documented comparisons of Czarist authoritarianism and Communist dictatorship. In terms of numbers of arrests and executions, and lengths of prison terms, he declares, the Soviet regime has exceeded imperial rule by factors ranging from 10 to 1 to 1,000 to 1. Solzhenitsyn also asserts that the Soviets killed and imprisoned far more people than the Nazis did, excluding wartime casualties on both sides. He estimates that in any one year of the Stalin era, 12,000,000 people were held in prison. "As some departed beneath...
Although it had other roots as well, the Zionist movement grew primarily out of life in imperial Russia. Restrictions on their geographic settlement and economic activity, as well as a religion and language of their own, made the Jews of Russia and Czarist Poland almost a nation, separate from the Russians, Poles, and other minorities around them. Although few people led particularly comfortable lives under the czars, toward the end at least, the Jews were probably most oppressed of all. Because they lived in cities, because they were traditionally the middlemen in Russia's feudal economy, and because when...
Even more than many of his famous contemporaries, Ben-Gurion seemed to personally represent the history of the people he led. Born in Czarist-ruled Poland, he bacame a Marxist in his teens, and helped found the Workers of Zion party in Palestine. Throughout his life he sought to build a "light to the nations," an Israel that would be a model of social justice and democracy. From the earliest years of his Zionist agitation Ben-Gurion pleaded for agreement between Jews and Arabs, provoking right-wing attacks that called him a doctrinaire socialist and deracinated cosmopolitan. In the last...