Revisionist Views of Solzhenitsyn
An alternative and highly controversial view was offered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, drawing wide accusations of antisemitism. Solzhenitsyn, while not attempting to justify all the repressive aspects of the May Laws and other Jewish legislation, claims that they might have been motivated by a desire for social stability, rather than religious or racist anti-Semitism, and that they were not as repressive as they might have been. For example, he shows that the edict forbidding rural settlement only applied to new Jewish settlers, and claims that many villages were exempt. The edict itself was advocated by Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev not only on the grounds that "the inhabitants of the countryside may know the government is protecting them from the Jews", but also because "governmental power is unable to defend against pogroms which might occur in scattered villages." So, according to Solzhenitsyn, the May Laws may be interpreted also as a measure to protect Jews, rather than oppress them.
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“The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”
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“You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.”
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