No Prize for History

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century as well as the moral conscience of the Soviet Union for almost fifty years. With his publication in Moscow last year of the first volume of Two Hundred Years Together 1795-1995 (Dvesti let vmeste 1795-1995), (not yet available in English), he undertakes another great moral task, an effort to reconcile Russians and Jews. This is necessary, he says, because the two sides are guilty of wrongs against each other, committed over the course of their long co-existence. The act of recounting this troubled relationship, he believes, will make reconciliation possible. We might see the book as a Russian version of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.