Chapter 14 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (available here)
recounts the events of 1917, a pivotal year in Russia. The main
impression conveyed throughout the chapter is the sheer energy
of the Jews—what I have elsewhere (pp. 24–26) labeled the
psychological intensity of Jewish activism. 1917 in Russia was a
year of rapid change, uncertainty and chaos—exactly the
situation where even a relatively small but well-organized,
energetic and highly motivated force may have a very large
impact. As an analogy, consider how relatively easy it would
have been to influence the structure of the U.S. government in
the unsettled period after the Revolutionary War than it is
today. Jews developed a huge range of organizations of all
types. Politically, they ranged from the center to the far left.
From the very first days after the February Revolution, central
newspapers published enormous number of announcements about
private meetings, assemblies and sessions of various Jewish
parties, initially mostly the Bund [a soci