Traditional prejudices.

• Author: Mahoney, Daniel J.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

I was dismayed to read Cathy Young's unbelievably shoddy account of the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ("Traditional Prejudices," May). Despite a deceptively calm and authoritative tone, she engages in nothing less than character assassination. She eschews anything that resembles explication de texte and instead relies upon the prosecutorial-conspiratorial musings of Semyon Reznik. Even more damning, she ignores everything in Solzhenitsyn's writings that might militate against her claims.

A reader of her column would never learn about Solzhenitsyn's condemnation of "scandalous restrictions" against Jews under die Russian old regime, his criticisms of the Russian state for its "impardonable inaction" in anticipating and responding to brutal anti-Jewish pogroms, his admiration for Pyotr Stolypin's efforts to end the Jewish disabilities, or his criticism of the White forces during the Russian Civil War for their inexcusable toleration of anti-Semitic violence and propaganda in territories under their control.

Nor would a reader learn anything about Solzhenitsyn's principled rejection of fascism and all its works, or his moving and somber discussion in Chapter 21 of Dvesti Let Vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together) of the Holocaust unleashed against Jews on Soviet territory.

Nor would one come across anything about Solzhenitsyn's admiration for Jews such as D.O. Linski, Iosif Bikerman, Michel Heller, Mikhail Agurski, Aleksandr Ginzburg, and Dora Sturman, nor about his highlighting of the "disproportionate" role played by Jews in the anti-Communist resistance of the 1960s and '70s.

Perhaps most egregious is Young's claim that the author of The Gulag Archipelago is somehow not a true friend of human liberty, that he is instead a partisan of a "traditionalist" collectivism. She simply ignores Solzhenitsyn's eloquent defense of the rule of law and the importance of local self-government to a healthy and well-constituted civic life.

More fundamentally, she shows no appreciation of the "personalism" that informs almost every page of The Gulag Archipelago. The portraits of freedom-loving individuals and indomitable souls such as the young Zoya Leshcheva, the defiant Anna Skripnikova, the committed escaper Georgi Tenno, and the religious poet Anatoli silin are simply unforgettable.

As any serious reader of Gulag will immediately discern, Solzhenitsyn is no collectivist. It is dishonest, and worse, to accuse this honorable man of the monstrosity which...