Two Hundred Years Together

Two Hundred Years Together is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume history of the Jewish people in Russia.

It will appear in English in a complete, unadulterated, authorized translation from the Russian, slated to be published by Creed and Culture in Spring 2028. The translator is Leo Shtutin, known for his translations of Mikhail Shishkin, Victor Beilis, and Solzhenitsyn’s Essays on Russian Literature (due out in 2027). This new edition will be furnished with a comprehensive, authoritative introduction by Prof. Daniel J. Mahoney, which will highlight the key themes of this long-awaited book. For more information, see the publisher’s website. Meanwhile, note that all English versions currently available on the Internet or in print are illegal, pirated, in violation of international copyright law, and entirely unauthorized. Such bowdlerized “translations” do not accurately reflect what Solzhenitsyn wrote; rather, they reflect the apparent prejudices of those who made them. English-language readers who wish to learn more about the book, while awaiting its publication in English, are invited to consult the trustworthy resources listed at the bottom of this page.

Two Hundred Years Together begins at the first significant appearance of Jews in the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century, continues through the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, and ends at the present day. The book grew out of The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn’s monumental opus on the Russian Revolution. As the author himself explains in chapter 13 of Two Hundred Years Together, in The Red Wheel he had shown the Revolution in its full complexity; and indeed—to avoid boiling down that complexity or skewing it via the narrow prism of the so-called “Jewish question”—he gave The Red Wheel priority of publication in every major language, ahead of Two Hundred Years Together. Now that the English publication of The Red Wheel is at last nearly complete, Anglophone readers will be able to place both works in their proper historical context.

In Two Hundred Years Together, while engaging on the economic, political, cultural, and religious level with the Jewish role in Russian history, including the Revolution, Solzhenitsyn emphatically denies (in chapters 9 and 14) that Revolution was the result of a “Jewish conspiracy” (just as he had earlier forcefully criticized the extreme Russian nationalists who were obsessed with Freemasons and Jews—see, e.g., Russia in Collapse, chapter 25, “The Maladies of Russian Nationalism”).

Two Hundred Years Together was first published in Russian in 2001–02, and several times since. The definitive Russian edition is published by Vremya (Moscow, 2015), as volumes 26 & 27 of their ongoing 30-volume collected works of Solzhenitsyn.

An authorized French translation is published in two volumes by Fayard.

• Deux siècles ensemble, tome 1 : Juifs et Russes avant la révolution

• Deux siècles ensemble, tome 2 : Juifs et Russes pendant la période soviétique

An authorized German translation is published in two volumes by Herbig, and can be found here:

• Zweihundert Jahre zusammen

English-language resources:

• Editors’ Introduction, Author’s Introduction, and excerpts from Chapters 8,9,15,16, translated by Alexis Klimoff & Stephan Solzhenitsyn, available in The Solzhenitsyn Reader.
  - Download (pdf)

• Author’s Introduction and the complete Chapter 11, translated by Jamey Gambrell, published in Common Knowledge, vol. 9, issue 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 204–27.
  - Download (pdf)