The Jewish Century [Hardcover]

To this conceit he adds another one, as irritating, repetitive, and forced. It is to divide the world into Mercurians and Apollonians. Mercurians are "service nomads" like the Jews, outsiders, originally mostly traders and then professionals, who service the needs of the resident Apollonians, mostly landed folk. The Mercurians are important enough when they are serving a landed society, but they become even more important when, in the course of modernity, Apollonian societies are forced to transform themselves into Mercurian ones: experience, talents and education then give the Jews a headstart in such societies.

To these "clever" conceits, Slezkine adds a brilliant capacity to coin striking phrases of a kind of which the following, on page 366, is just one example:

"From being the Jewish God's Chosen People, the Jews had become the Nazis' chosen people, and by becoming the Nazis' chosen people, they became the Chosen People of the postwar Western world."

Leaving these characteristics of the book aside, it is full of illuminating and sometimes controversial reflections. Some of these are devoted to the descendants of Beilke and Chava, but the bulk of the book refers to the Jews in the Soviet Union, and I want to confine my comments to the new perspectives on Soviet Jews which this book has opened up to me.

First there is the emphasis on the emigration from the Pale into the interior of Russia and in particular into the great cities: by 1939 1.3 million Jews were living in areas that had been closed to them in Tsarist times. I had not realized that even after the Tsarist pogroms and the vicious discrimination the May Laws, the Jews were still hugely over-represented in the professions. In 1910, for example, in Odessa the Jews still administered 70% of its banks, provided 70% of its doctors, and 56% of its lawyers. With such educational advantages they would have done extremely well anyway once the Soviets had given them civil equality, and their natural advantage was further boosted by the Soviets getting rid as fast as they could of "bourgeois experts" in the administration, by excluding their children from universities, and filling the resulting vacuum with the only people capable of filling it: the educated Jews. So the enthusiasm of secular Jews for the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s is very comprehensible.

Slezkine argues that the large number of Jews who suffered in the Great Terror suffered not because they were Jews, but because Stalin was purging the upper echelons for his own political and paranoid reasons, and since so many of the upper echelons were Jews, they naturally made up a high proportion of his victims. In fact, when you move away from the élites, Slezkine shows that Jews were under-represented among those arrested for political crimes: 1% of Jews, compared with 16% of Poles and 30% of Latvians; and in the Gulags the proportion of Jews was 15.7% below the proportion of Jews in the Soviet Union. Slezkine therefore takes seriously Stalin's condemnation of antisemitism in his speech to the 15th Party Congress in 1927, and shows that between 1927 and 1932 articles against antisemitism "appeared in the Moscow and Leningrad newspapers almost daily." Slezkine therefore differs from Arkady Vaksberg's thesis in Stalin Against the Jews (1994) that Stalin cunningly disguised his antisemitism by occasionally bringing antisemites to trial and by promoting or favouring individual Jews.

Of course Slezkine does not disguise the overt antisemitism which Stalin displayed after the war. He explains it by Stalin's realization that even the most ardent Jewish communists, who used in the early days to separate themselves from all things Jewish, had had their "Jewish blood" stirred first by the antisemitism of the Nazis and then by identification of Israel. He now suspected especially the "passport Jews" - that is those Jews who, when compulsory passports were introduced for the whole population, had chosen to describe their nationality as Evrei rather than as Russian, Ukrainian etc.

After Stalin's death, the most vicious antisemitism eased off; but the government continued to exclude Jews from the government and from the upper echelons of the Party. It also imposed quotas on Jews at the universities, though Slezkine argued that these were also applied to Georgians and Armenians who, like the Jews, were disproportionately represented at universities. It was at least in part to "positive discrimination" being applied to Uzbeks, Tatars and Azerbajanis. Besides, by then the Soviet educational system had produced 2.4 million college students against whom Jews now had to compete, compared with only 177,000 in 1928.

Even now, however, Jews continued to be over-represented in the professions and remained "light years ahead" of Uzbeks, Tatars etc.; but discrimination against them for whatever reason, had now thoroughly disenchanted them with the Soviet system which they had helped so much to create. As in the time of the Tsars, many of them now became the most prominent dissidents and many others wanted to emigrate. So when Gorbachev at last opened the gates, the exodus was massive. Yet those who remained continued to be over-represented in the market economy in Russia that was introduced when the Soviet Union collapsed: of the seven wealthiest 'oligarchs', six were Jews. And when the bar excluding them from government positions was raised, they swiftly produced two of Yeltsin's prime ministers: Sergei Kiriyenko and Yevgeni Primakov.

Soviet Jews had for long backed and actively participated in a regime which, though progressive in some respects, had committed terrible crimes against real or supposed opponents. Historians like Vaksberg focus on the Jews as victims of Stalin's antisemitism; but Solzhenistyn raises the question: should not the notion of collective guilt be as applicable to those Soviet Jews as it is to the Germans? Slezkine's answer is that both approaches are "quite marginal" - an odd evasion, it seems to me, in an otherwise brave book.