FAKE QUOTE FALSELY ATTRIBUTED TO SOLZHENITSYN

A malicious, entirely fake quote attributed to Solzhenitsyn has been making the rounds of the internet. Some versions are longer, some are shorter, but all are entirely fake, whether or not the people posting and re-posting them are aware of this. Here it is:

You must understand. The leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians! They hated Christians! Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured & slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. The October Revolution was not what you call in America the ‘Russian Revolution’. It was an invasion & conquest over the Russian people. More of my countrymen suffered horrific crimes at the blood-stained hands than any people, or nation ever suffered in the entirety of human history. It cannot be understated! Bolshevism was the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant of this reality is proof that the global media itself is in the hands of the perpetrators. We cannot state that all Jews are Bolsheviks, but without Jews there would have been no Bolshevism. For a Jew, nothing is more insulting than the truth. The blood-maddened Jewish terrorists murdered 66 million in Russia from 1918 to 1957.

We challenge anyone to demonstrate where, exactly, Solzhenitsyn purportedly writes any of this; please indicate work title, chapter name, and page number. Knock yourselves out, but you will never be able to—because this passage does not exist in his writings. What makes a fake like this especially damaging is that it takes elements of Solzhenitsyn’s thought and re-packages them in a veneer of plausibility. (After all, Solzhenitsyn WAS an implacable enemy of Bolshevism, right?… And he DID mention the figure of 66 million casualties in his Gulag Archipelago?…) But not a single phrase in this fake is an actual quote, nor is the overall idea faithful in the least to Solzhenitsyn’s worldview. And most reprehensible of all is the attribution to Solzhenitsyn of the tired anti-Semitic canard that it was “the Jews” who were responsible for the Russian Revolution. Without minimizing Jewish involvement in the Revolution, Solzhenitsyn, in Two Hundred Years Together, nonetheless sums up his overall conclusion about that complex topic with words that unambiguously contradict the fake quote:

“During my many years of in-depth work on the February Revolution it fell to me to make out its essence and understand the role played in it by Jews. I have concluded for myself, and can reiterate now, that, no, the February Revolution was not something the Jews did to the Russians—it was undoubtedly the handiwork of Russians themselves, as I believe I have amply demonstrated in The Red Wheel.”

— Solzhenitsyn, Two Hundred Years Together, chapter 13

Please help spread the word by making your voice heard anywhere you see this fake, or ones like it, and feel free to refer back to this post.

"Two Hundred Years Together" to be published in English

We are pleased to announce that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, a two-volume history of the Jewish people in Russia in a complete, unadulterated, authorized translation from the Russian, is 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 and our own book page here. Meanwhile, please 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 prejudices of those who made them.

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”).

Let Solzhenitsyn himself have the final word (from the preamble to Part One):

“I have never recognized anyone’s right to conceal that which was. Nor can I advocate an accord founded on an unjust portrayal of the past. I call for patient mutual understanding from both parties, Russians and Jews alike, and call on both sides to recognize their own share of wrongdoing. How easy it would be, instead, to turn a blind eye and say, well, that wasn’t really us…
I have made a sincere attempt to understand both sides. To do so, I have delved into events, not polemics. I try to show, and enter into debates only in those unavoidable cases where the truth has been buried under accretions of falsehood. I dare to anticipate that this book will not be greeted by the wrath of extremists and fanatics, and will instead facilitate conciliation. And I hope to find well-meaning collocutors among Jews as well as Russians.
My ultimate aim, as I envisage it, is to identify, to the best of my ability, mutually agreeable and constructive pathways for the future development of Russian–Jewish relations.”

— Solzhenitsyn, Two Hundred Years Together, preamble

New Russian edition of Two Hundred Years Together

Moscow publisher Prozaik has issued, in two volumes, a new Russian edition of Two Hundred Years Together, illustrated with paintings and photographs relating to the entire period (roughly 1772-1972) covered by the book. The text is the canonical final authorized text, as published in vols. 26 & 27 of Solzhenitsyn’s Collected Works in 2015.

English readers are reminded that an authorized translation of the full work is firmly in the plans, but awaits the completion of English publication of The Red Wheel. Therefore, no information is yet available regarding a specific publication timeline. 

Meanwhile, readers need to be forewarned that any and all English versions available on the Internet are illegal, pirated, and/or entirely unauthorized; often poorly and loosely translated; and redact passages, and indeed whole chapters, that apparently do not support the prejudices of those behind these illegal editions.