Collected works of V. 26-27 two Hundred years together

In volume 26 of the collected WORKS published the first part of the study two HUNDRED YEARS TOGETHER (1795-1995) (for the first time: Moscow: Russian world, 2001) on Russian-Jewish relations "in pre-revolutionary Russia". The author describes and analyzes the changing position of Jews in the Russian Empire, highlighting the particularly important historical moments (the era of the Great reforms, the Russian revolution, the First world war). In the field of view of Solzhenitsyn include the policy of the Supreme power, the attitude of the Jews of the Russian public, the role of Jews in developing capitalism, and their participation in the revolutionary movement, the beginning and the spread of Zionism in Russia, the tragedy of the riots, the fight for the abolition of the pale of settlement and other restrictive regulations. The purpose of the study is formulated in the Preface: "find all points of common understanding and all possible paths into the future, cleansed from the bitterness of the past... I Sincerely try to understand both sides. This - immersed in the events and in debate. Strive to show".

In volume 27 of the collected WORKS published the second part of the study two HUNDRED YEARS TOGETHER (for the first time: Moscow: Russian world, 2002) on Russian-Jewish relations, "in Soviet times". Strongly rejecting the myth of the perfect Jewish revolution, the author analyzes the participation of Jews in the events of 1917 and the Civil war (including in the ranks of the White movement). The "Jewish question" in the USSR is considered in close connection with the common fate of European Jewry in the twentieth century and the Holocaust and the tragedy of Russia under Communist rule: the winding process of assimilation of Jews in the 1920s-1930s and its consequences (including the rise of grassroots anti-Semitism); the fate of Russian Jewry in the first emigration; Jews as victims and participants of Communist terror ("Gulag camps"); the Jews "in the war with Germany". Considered in detail the postwar turn of Stalin's policy of state anti-Semitism. In chapters 22-26 are traced the vicissitudes of Russian-Jewish relations in the second half of 1950s - early 1980-ies, the Exodus of Jews from Russia began after the Seven-day war (1967). In conclusion, the author reflects on the complexities and paradoxes of Jewish assimilation, symbolically completing the book with a quote from the published in Israel (1981) "Letters from Russia": "I believe no accident happened on the roads of Russia - this contact is the soul of the Jewish and Slavic soul that was here for a purpose".