Gorky, Censorship and the Jews
Souvarine, Boris
Lenin's death in 1924 produced in the Soviet Union a flood of apologies, memoirs and eulogies, no less sincere because their author had criticized Lenin on previous occasions. Among them...
...Gorky's New York lecture On the Jews, read in the Grand Central Palace on April 25, 1906, and his letter On Zionism, published jointly as a pamphlet by Pravda in 1907, have also been eliminated from the 30-volume Academy edition...
...Further omitted are Gorky's 30-page preface to The Legend of Ahasverus, The Wandering Jew (Petrograd, Grebin, 1919) and his famous article on the Kishinev pogrom, first published in the anthology A Protest against Society (Berlin, Hugo Steinitz, no date...
...Gorky's article on The Black Hundred Pogromists published as a pamphlet in Berne by the Commission to Aid Political Prisoners and republished in the Geneva Russian magazine Novyi Koloss (no date available) was omitted from the Academy edition of Gorky's Works...
...And it hardly needs stressing that the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow could no more censor Gorky's works on its own initiative than the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences could publish on its own Judaism Without Embellishment, a pamphlet of Nazi inspiration and illustrated in Nazi style, which roused a brief flurry of indignation in the West...
...But it is a detail that deserves full publicity...
...They exist in a French translation by Andre Pierre Ecrite de Revolution (Paris, Stock, 1922...
...This list is far from exhaustive...
...These are barefaced lies...
...The systematic censorship of Gorky's works by the Soviet authorities for more than a third of a century proves this abundantly...
...It is Lenin who speaks and Gorky who quotes him —a Gorky who rallied to the regime he had so bitterly criticized...
...nonetheless, it was repeated in the numerous republications of Gorky's Works, including the latest, in 18 volumes (1959-63...
...These writings have been frequently republished since 1924...
...Reprinted from Preuves and translated from the French by I. A. LANGNAS 1 Maxime Gorky, Lenine et Le Paysan Russe, Paris, 1924, Editions du Sagittaire...
...Lenin's death in 1924 produced in the Soviet Union a flood of apologies, memoirs and eulogies, no less sincere because their author had criticized Lenin on previous occasions...
...I need hardly add that the articles on the Russian Revolution, which Gorky wrote in 1917-18 for the Novaya Zhizn magazine as long as it was allowed to be published, have also been censored in our time in the name of "science...
...But there is no reason to doubt his estimate that the pages written by Gorky in defense of persecuted Jews and censored by the Soviet government and the Soviet Academy acting upon its orders, would fill a volume of some 200-300 pages...
...The Urchin, a short story by Gorky, also included in Shchit, was omitted from the Academy's 30-volume edition and the later 18-volume edition, just as it had been from the previous 23volume edition (Moscow and Leningrad, Gosizdat, 1925-30...
...Nor did such things happen by accident or as exceptional cases...
...Both Academies are strictly controlled by the party's apparat which gives them orders and sees to it that they are properly carried out...
...2 Maxime Gorky, Vladimir Lenine, Leningrad, 1924, p. 20...
...We are, generally speaking, a gifted people, but intellectually lazy...
...2 One may or may not agree with Lenin...
...There are people who try to justify Soviet anti-Semitism by pretending that the Communist government has nothing to do with it and that the Soviet leaders are doing their best to uproot an evil deeply rooted in the popular mind...
...Can any one seriously believe that the Soviet Academy of Sciences censored Gorky and Lenin in response to the wishes of the illiterate masses...
...Here are some of his findings...
...Those who try to exonerate Khrushchev and Co., exhibit either ignorance or bad faith...
...The omission is hardly academic and certainly not scientific...
...An intelligent Russian is almost always a Jew or a man with Jewish blood...
...Yet, if we consult Volume 17 of the 30-volume edition of Gorky's work published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Moscow 1948-56), we find that the last sentence of the passage quoted above has been omitted...
...Gorky's book on the Russian peasant contains, in addition to numerous condemnations of the acts of collective cruelty which tarnish the history of Russia, a particularly vehement passage on the pogroms.3 But this passage is not to be found in the Academy edition of Gorky's Works...
...Nor can it be found in any new edition, or anthology...
...no one contests their places in the Communist Pantheon...
...Equally censored was another Gorky article On the Kishinev Pogrom, first published in the 1900's, Osvobozhdeniye, republished in Revolutsionnaya Rossiya and in many other magazines...
...Leon Bernstein, who died at an advanced age, was unable to complete his study...
...The same fate befell Gorky's article on Bialik, published in the magazine Evreiskaya Zhizn, number 14-15, 1916...
...it doesn't matter...
...A report which Gorky presented on December 12, 1915 to the Russian Association of Studies of Jewish Life, published in Letopis magazine of January 1916, is also omitted from the Academy edition...
...The late Leon Bernstein, an old Bundist, a very learned man and an expert on modern Russian political literature, wrote a comparative study on the publication of Gorky's works, alas left unfinished...
...The censorship is merely one little detail of the systematic policy of hostility to the small Jewish minority of the Soviet Union, matched by a foreign policy which goes out of its way to sell Soviet arms to Arab countries for use against Israel...
...Among them was Gorky, who paid tribute to Lenin in many moving pages...
...Both Lenin and Gorky are beyond suspicion to Marxist-Leninist purists...
...Chez Simon Kra...
...The pamphlet also contained a pro-Jewish piece by the Russian novelist Korolenko, The Treason of Mariampol, reprinted in the Russkie Vedomosti of August 30, 1916, but excluded, as if by accident, from its rightful place in Volume 10 of Korolenko's Works (Moscow, 1953...
...3 Maxime Gorky, 0 Russkom Krestianstvie (On the Russian Peasantry), Berlin, J. P. Ladyzhnikov, 1922, p. 20...
...But that is another story, and not a Jewish one...
...there even exists a French translation by Dumesnil de Gramont.l Gorky had a remarkable memory and was undoubtedly a first-rate story-teller...
...He relates several interesting conversations and quotes the following passage from Lenin verbatim: "There are few intelligent people among us...
...The anthology Shchit (Shield), compiled by Gorky, Leonid Andreyev and Fyodor Sologub (second edition, Moscow, Mamantov, 1916), included an untitled contribution by Gorky, which the Academy chose to omit for reasons it prefers not to disclose...
...This time the entire passage has been censored by a decree from on high...
Vol. 12 • January 1965 • No. 1
