[Sillaycheg]

OK, Nnyhav, what if I'm wrong, and Stalin only murdered a few Yiddish poets, and occasionally cosied up to Jews and was only 48% anti-Semitic, if compared with Adolf Schickelgr?ber, who probably had a spot of Jewish blood himself? I wasn't there, thank God. You could argue that Stalin practised equality when it came to deporting, enslaving and murdering people, and that the poor old Jews were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But another strand to my argument is that Russians have been anti-Semitic for centuries, hence the occasional pogrom. Stalin merely needed to steer Russians in a direction they would willingly go.

As for Lithuanian anti-Semitism, until WWII, Lithuanian culture was very much a rural affair, and I would imagine that Lithuanians were easily roused to help along with the murder of the Jews, as there were fewer intellectuals. In the 1930s, Kaunas was the centre of what Lithuanian culture and literature there was, with Vilnius, the present capital, belonging to Poland. Vilnius had more Poles and Yiddish-speaking Jews than Lithuanians, by the way. I remember reading that the Yiddish and Polish-speaking poets fraternised, but that the Lithuanians kept away. There are quite complicated movements of nations, hatreds, loves and so on between Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Belarusians, Yiddish-speaking Jews and so on. The whole issue deserves reading about. It is complex.

But Russians imply nowadays that present-day Lithuanians, now westernised members of the EU, and living in a city that was not really theirs 60 years ago, are the same Lithuanians that helped Hitler murder Jews. This is a sleight of hand to prove, as always, that Russia is right.

And that's where we come full circle to that curious man Alexander (Aleksandr) Solzhenitsyn who, as Nnyhav points out, isn't entirely squeaky clean, when it comes to Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism, despite his heroic publication of masses of material condemning the horrors of the Gulag. It cannot be denied that a lot of key members of early Communism in Russia were indeed of Jewish background. But unfortunately, if you try to find objective information on this on the internet, the only people discussing it seem to be neo-fascists (often websites with red and blue headings and many exclamation marks) written by rabid anti-Semites, who are only too eager to see everything in black-and-white terms. There appears to be a whole industry on the net of websites by revisionists of the David Irving type, and you can find little published by philo-Semites. So it's another ethnic minefield.

Anne Applebaum, who has written the well-researched book Gulag, and is of Jewish origin as you can see from her surname, mentions Solzhenitsyn as one of the chief sources of material for her book, but doesn't turn the Gulag into a Jewish plot, as others have done. There were Jews both as prisoners and camp administrators.