Two Hundred Years Together

Two Hundred Years Together (Russian: Двести лет вместе, Dvesti let vmeste) is a two-volume historical essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

He asserts that the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire were not government-sponsored but spontaneous acts of violence, except for some government culpability in the Pale of Settlement.

"[8] Solzhenitsyn criticizes the "scandalous" weakness and "unpardonable inaction" that prevented the Russian Tsarist state from adequately protecting the lives and property of its Jewish subjects.

[16] This assertion has been discredited, as the number of Commissars in the first Soviet government on 7 November 1917 was 15, not 20, of whom 11 were ethnic Russians (Milyutin, Yelizarov, Skvortsov-Stepanov, Lomov, Rykov, Lenin, Lunacharsky, Shlyapnikov, Nogin, Krylenko and Avilov), two Ukrainians (Antonov-Ovseyenko and Dybenko), one Pole (Teodorovich), and only one Jew (Trotsky).

At the same time Pipes writes that Solzhenitsyn is "too eager to exonerate czarist Russia of mistreating its Jewish subjects, and as a consequence is insensitive to the Jews' predicament".

[24] Petrovsky-Shtern says that Solzhenitsyn claims that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and "strangled" the Russian merchant class in Moscow.

According to Reznik, Solzhenitsyn is careful in his vocabulary, generous in compliments toward Jews and maintains a neutral tone throughout, but at the same time he not only condones repressive measures against Jews, but justifies them as intended for protection of the rights of Russians as the titular nation that supposedly "greatly suffered from Jewish exploitation, alcohol mongering, usury and corruption of the traditional way of life".

[36] John Klier, a historian at University College London, describes the charges of antisemitism as "misguided", but at the same time writes that in his account of the pogroms of the early 20th century, Solzhenitsyn is far more concerned with exonerating the good name of the Russian people than he is with the suffering of the Jews, and he accepts the Tsarist government's canards blaming the pogroms on provocations by the Jews themselves.

[37] A detailed analysis of THYT and an overview of critical opinion thereon was published by the University of Waterloo professor Zinaida Gimpelevich.

[39] Literary historian Leonid Katsis accuses Solzhenitsyn of numerous manipulated and selective quotations in the first volume of the book, detrimental to its trustworthiness.

[41] Historians Leybelman, Levinskaya, and Abramov claim that Solzhenitsyn uncritically used writings of antisemitic pseudo-historian[42] Andrey Dikiy for his inflated statistical data of Jewish participation in the early Soviet government and its security apparatus.

[35][43][44][45] Mark Deutch, in a two-part review titled "A Shameless Classic" ("Бесстыжий классик"),[46][47] lists numerous drawbacks, stemming, in his opinion, from biased exposition, ignoring well-known sources, self-contradictions, and factual errors.