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Social Sciences
Vol. 30, No. 1/March 1999
Does the Russian Intelligentsia Deserve its Name?
By Nikolai Karlov
*
For many decades, both the powers that be and the so-called “masses”, either separately or together, heartily despised both the intelligentsia as a whole and its individual members. Intelligentsia has become a bad word. At the same time, neither the people nor the leaders can exist without a state that unites the nation. In its turn, a state cannot exist without a state idea, which may be formulated in very general terms but is interpreted in more or less the same way by everyone.
There are different forms of state and different ways of realizing the idea of statehood. The most stable states are the one that are, or regard themselves as, national. The word nation is used here not in the ethnic sense but in the sense in which it is used by the United Nations Organization, that is, as a certain state unity, almost as a synonym of the word State as a whole.
A national state cannot exist without national self-awareness. National self-awareness is impossible without a national intelligentsia. Hence the need for a healthy intelligentsia in a healthy state.
But what is intelligentsia? Many people tried to give an exhaustive, noncontroversial, and at the same time meaningful definition of this word.
In modern Russia, this term is usually interpreted as designating a certain community of people who are, for the most part, well-educated, are engaged in intellectual work, instinctively follow a certain moral and ethical code, and, unfortunately, suffer from the weakness of will, absence of persistence and a taste for action, are eaten up with skepticism and doubt, and traditionally place themselves in opposition to the powers that be. This is far from exhausting the notion. Any member of the intelligentsia would be able to expand or narrow down this list of characteristics. The main thing is, however, a property that is hard to pinpoint, some indefinable aura or nimbus. Indeed, we have a sort of exclusive circle: an intellectual is a person which belongs to the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia is a community of such people.
One can, of course, differentiate the concept by identifying the so-called “creative intelligentsia”, army intelligentsia, scientific intelligentsia, pedagogues, medical intelligentsia, etc. But this does not solve the problem.
According to contemporaries (whose testimony is refuted by some researchers), the word intelligentsia was introduced in the 1860s by Petr Boborykin (1836–1921), a well-known writer of the naturalist school, honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He based himself on the Latin word intelligentia, which means: (1) comprehension, reason, perceptiveness, cognitive force; (2) concept, notion, idea; (3) perception, sensual cognition; (4) skill, art. The word intelligent, member of the intelligentsia, which is derived from Latin intelligens, means: (1) well-informed, understanding, knowledgeable; (2) sensible, reasonable; (3) adept, specialist.
Just as curious are the interpretations of the term intelligentsia offered by popular but serious enough English language dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary: “Intelligentsia....the class of society regarded as possessing culture and political initiative.”
Webster’s Dictionary: “Intellectuals who form an artistic, social or political vanguard or elite.”
The Longman Dictionary: “The people in society who are highly educated and often concern themselves with ideas and new developments, especially in art or politics.”
So the intelligentsia creates an ideology, the intelligentsia lives by ideology, the intelligentsia does its best to introduce ideology into life. Not without reason, it is usually assumed that in the process of creating and disseminating an ideology, in the process of the latter’s multiplication, simplification and adaptation, a major role is played by literature. Allow me to remind you that Lenin described himself as a man of letters.
There is, however, literature and literature.
Great world literature is a noble phenomenon, although perhaps on the dry side. It is filled with the juices of life by the picaresque (and sometimes the adventure) novel. Homer’s Odyssey, Apuleius’ Lucian, Sindbad the Sailor of the Arabian fairy tales, Miguel Cervantes’ Sancho Panza, Francois Rabelais’ Panurge, Lesage’s Gil Blas, Alexander Dumas’ D’Artagnan, Charles De Coster’s Till Eulenspiegel, Charles Dickens’ Sam Weller, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Solovyov’s Hojja Nasreddin, Jaroclav Hasek’s Svejk and, finally, Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender are the gates through which the river of life that so happily washes the literary shores is flowing. The list is tentative and does not claim to be complete. However, reflecting the author’s literary preferences or, which is the same thing, range of reading, it gives a general idea of the evolution of at least part of literature.
The stream is far from straight, it weaves and meanders, divides into branches, forms surprising loops, at times seems to go back, makes new beds for itself. But its eternal flow cannot be stopped. Literature is alive for as long as the stream has not dried up, for as long as it washes, even if sometimes artificially, the literary continent, which, fed by the life-giving force of the picaresque novel, bears flowers and fruit.
The body of great literature is supplied with oxygen by the blood of the adventure, the picaresque, the schematic, the parodistic novel. Typically, all these literary forms reject the intelligentsia and the things associated with it. This means that, despite the most serious, most sincere assertions to the contrary, literature as a reflection of real life, or as a reflection of the ideal, as a mode of building ideal reality, does not accept the intelligentsia in any profound and essential way. Examples are not hard to find. Suffice it to point out such a fact of Literature with the capital letter as A. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Why is this so? A rhetorical question; nevertheless, it is a fact that literature, which is, by definition, a creation of the intelligentsia, has a negative attitude towards the intelligentsia. The better, the more honest literature is, the more manifest this paradoxical feature becomes.
One has to recognize that real literature reflects real life. When I was a teen-ager in the 1930s, intelligent (the noun) was a term of abuse, and the word intelligentsia was uttered with undisguised contempt in the Moscow suburb where I lived.
This was the attitude, not only of a working-class suburb or of the philistines, although one can argue that they were not the worst part of Russia’s population. Osip Mandelshtam, a wonderful, sophisticated and courageous poet, whom one cannot accuse of crudeness of perception, wrote in 1924: “The above (on the inability to understand poetry.— N. K.) is true only of the half-educated mass of the intelligentsia, who are infected with snobbishness, have lost the sense of the language, are tickling the long-deadened nerves with light and cheap stimulants, dubious lyricism and neologisms that are often alien and hostile to the Russian language.” 1
This is just one, although an important aspect of the matter. The linguistic irresponsibility of the so-called intelligentsia would not have provoked popular contempt were it not a manifestation of something else and had it not roots that are sometimes deep and sometimes visible, but are always essential, crucial. Here is a recent testimonial, 2 which interprets “the intelligentsia’s adaptability to an alien, ignorant power, ‘sincerity’ for the sake of salvation. In the animal world, this is known as mimicry, an attempt to become invisible to a predator.” Attention is also drawn to the far from infrequent transition from adaptation to involvement, which led to “obedient adherence to an existence that is not in your hands by a long chalk.”
In a relatively “vegetarian” period, in early September 1971, Khrushchev, who by that time had been retired seven years, talked with apparent sincerity about his mistakes in relation to the intelligentsia and about his administrative (essentially police) decisions that he passed without bothering to go to the heart of the matter, without grasping the essence of the problem. In his repentance, he asked whether he or anyone else in his shoes had a legitimate right to pass decisions on creative matters; who, he inquired, were Suslov, Khrushchev or Stalin to tell the intelligentsia how to live and work? In the last chapter of his memoirs, which, according to the editor, he did not find quite satisfactory, he set forth the opinion that “all despots were well disposed towards men of letters only provided the latter were complimentary about the former and their epoch”. But, saying that “we must be more daring in giving the creative intelligentsia an opportunity to speak out, to act, to create,” 3 the author of the memoirs still proceeds from the indisputable truth that “since in ideology, the Communist Party is trying to retain monopoly, its wish to win the intelligentsia over to its side needs no explanation.” 4
One has to admit that Khrushchev talked with real pain about the relations between power and the intelligentsia, viewing the issue from the stand of power. He saw that in one way or another, easily and naturally or with difficulty and even at an exorbitant cost, the powers that be manage to establish cooperation with the intelligentsia, which in the end enters into such cooperation quite consciously. And not only the so-called “technical intelligentsia,” whom Khrushchev rather clumsily opposed to the “creative intelligentsia”.
Needless to say, the conformism, to use the least offensive term, of the bulk of the people who regard themselves as members of the intelligentsia or are traditionally believed to belong among this group, made a contribution to the hostility with which it is often viewed. While in an engineer, technician, serviceman or physician, provided they are professionally competent, social and cultural conformism can be justified by the wish to do one’s job and for this reason appears just what it is, conformism, in the people who, as the saying used to go, engaged in the liberal arts, it easily becomes reptilian mimicry and servility.
Both the powers that be and the “masses” sensed hypocrisy, insincerity, falsity. This did nothing to boost respect for the intelligentsia, which was perceived, simplistically and unjustifiably, as a solid body.
The intelligentsia’s inadequacy, its inability to live up to its own idea—this is what underlies the dislike it provokes in many people.
The inclination to blindly follow the authority proved lethal when, in an attempt to run away from itself, our intelligentsia embraced nonconformism, but treated the new as simple, direct, linear rejection of the old and in this manner arrived to new conformism.
Having generated, first, the autocracy and then Soviet government, the intelligentsia in a fit of nonconformism went on to simple and unsophisticated opposition. Instead of painstaking work to gradually improve the situation, these people embarked on the road of rejection pure and unadulterated. Unfortunately, the intelligentsia as a body of people proved unable to rise above humdrum daily consciousness, which does not even try to deal with complex, multidimensional, multifaceted problems that are essentially general and abstract. The very idea that the link between causes and effects may not be quite straightforward, that the sought-for decisions may vary within a certain range, that the opponent may be right is irksome and even outrageous. A simple opposition of red to white and of white to red with a simple outcome, “he who was nothing will become everything”—this is what determined the Russian intelligentsia’s mode of existence in the 19 th and 20 th century. This idea was based on a conceptual foundation, a vulgarized oversimplified mechanistic Cartesian model of man bolstered with the principles of the so-called rationalism. It was either forgotten or never realized that the liberal idea implies personal freedom provided there is also personal responsibility. Preoccupation with technology, including social technology, obscured morality. Such oblivion is bound to avenge itself. Both moral sense and the art of engineering begin to feel bad. It would be a mistake and even a crime to reduce the bloody Stalinist regime to Stalin’s personality traits. It is a natural outcome, a result of age-old operation of the intelligentsia with its intolerance and pathological passion to carry everything to an absurd extreme. Everyone knows what happened as a result.
Here is a tableau from our recent past. I happened to hear highly skilled and, let me stress, sober machine-tool operators employed at a large factory say, with great satisfaction, how good it was for the workingman to have the bosses, that is, the managerial and technical intelligentsia, arrested and incarcerated. It did not occur to anyone to give some thought to the consequences this would have for industry generally and the country’s defense capacity in particular, i.e., the position of the workingman. The same was true of the military intelligentsia.
Everything was mixed up: the outcome of the work of the ideological and creative intelligentsia was the tragic fate of the natural scientific, technical, military, managerial and religious intelligentsia, as well as the emergence of a large group of people who can and should be described as the lumpen-intelligentsia, a sort of human oxymoron. And yet the definitions of the intelligentsia common sense imply that it should be the leader of the people, the leader of the nation, the leader of the state.
It was said more than 800 years ago: “The head is not happy without a neck, the body is not happy without a head.” 5 And if the head chooses a route of evil, there emerges a crisis pithily described back in 1803 by the future hero of the war against Napoleon, hussar, guerrilla and poet Denis Davydov in his fable “The Head and the Body”: “You have a right to rule, but we have a right to stumble and, having stumbled, may unwittingly knock Your Majesty against a stone.”
This is exactly what happened. There is, indeed, nothing new under the Sun. In 1836, Davydov wrote his last and best known poem, “The Modern Song”, where he exposed the imbecility of cheap liberalism and the quasi-wisdom of Catholicism to which the contemporary “advanced segments of the public” arrived in their oxymoronic “conformism of negation.”
In historical terms, the Russian intelligentsia, that is, persons engaged in the liberal arts par excellence, can be blamed for destroying both themselves and the Russian people, having turned away from the Russian Orthodox Church and forsaken God, having forgotten all about the interests of their homeland as a whole, and having become strangers to their own people. Its first historical sin is non-patriotism. Easily identifiable in the history of this country are periods when the conspicuous, brilliant, noisy and talented part of the intelligentsia became non-patriotic, and the situation in Russia deteriorated. And the other way around. Its second sin is a paradoxical consequence of the first one, the dissemination of the idea of communality carried to an absurd extreme, the idea of the “great simple truth”, of equal distribution of everything among everyone.
Frankly speaking, illimitable conformism and rigid extreme opposition, which causes the non-patriotic attitude and thoughtless sentimental adoration of the village commune—all this, having been brought, individually and together, to a ridiculous extreme caused the Russian intelligentsia to collapse.
But to reason in just this way would mean to succumb to polemic fervor and to deliberately impoverish the real picture of developments, to unjustifiably narrow down the issue, to get fixated on purely Russian phenomena. In actual fact, phenomena that belong to civilization generally are also significant.
It has been clear since Adam that the presence in man of a set of essential properties since the earliest stages of his history—love of morals, the need to do useful work, healthy curiosity—ensured the very possibility of the existence of the human community, having set this community apart from the world of animals and opposed man to the rest of the animate and inanimate nature. It should be emphasized that man’s generic properties that played a significant part especially at the dawn of human existence included not only moral sense and not only the capacity for conscious and goal-oriented labor, but also an irrepressible taste for novelty, healthy curiosity, a thirst for knowledge. This unity dates back to the primitive times, from human prehistory, and directly arises from the role which the welding of morality, the need for useful labor, and love of learning played in the establishment of the homo sapiens. Of exceptional importance was the issue of consolidation of these properties, their establishment and utilization for the benefit of both the individual and the community, which acted, at least in early history, as a tribal union. In the course of history, advancement and victory are achieved by the tribe that competently applies this triad of essential human traits because it knows how to efficiently accumulate, improve, disseminate and transmit knowledge and skills.
All this is, by definition, the business of the intelligentsia; satisfying this need is precisely what creates an intelligentsia.
Throughout human history, people, large and small human communities needed specialists whose professional level and high qualifications would not only meet the needs of the time but would run ahead of these needs. In our day and age, this need is felt especially keenly. The needs of society are currently met most fully by scientific development; the specialists to which the reference was just made are professional researchers, who create new knowledge, and research engineers, who create new technologies. As a rule, such highly qualified specialists are shaped by years of training. Its stages are known well enough: primary, secondary and higher education, and then scientific degrees.
These are the stages of the professional establishment of a member of the intelligentsia. It is through the work carried out by the intelligentsia that personality develops its human talents with a view of using them for one’s own benefit, the benefit of the country and mankind at large. And this would be impossible without professionalism. In its turn, professionalism cannot be attained without moral advancement; and moral advancement is impossible without training in some concrete field. A person cannot be well-trained in a concrete field unless he has a trade or profession.
Science, knowledge, the ways of obtaining and transmitting knowledge are components of culture, which also incorporates world outlook and creative perception and reproduction of the world that is external in relation to man and his inner world. It is obvious that culture is the intelligentsia’s playground. And, despite the political, economic and social changes, culture has always produced the intelligentsia which generates culture.
The ways and standards of life kept changing, but civilization continued. For about 2,000 years European civilization has been Christian in both form and content. Persons engaged in intellectual labor, first ecclesiastics and then legists and medics, upheld the banner of ancient (Mediterranean) civilization through the millenniums of European history, advanced and multiplied the store of knowledge and education. The persons in these three professions were responsible for the well-being in the three life spheres that had, and still have, the greatest significance for humans: preservation of grace, salvation of the soul; preservation and increase of material wealth; and preservation and improvement of one’s health.
Associations of these specialists, their congregations determined an epoch’s intellectual atmosphere.
Ever since the 18 th century, the powerful have been clearly aware of the applied significance of scientific congregations usable by an enlightened Sovereign precisely because new knowledge was generated in a community of people who did this as a profession. In the modern world, individual well-being and state security and stability inseparably connected with it are even more strongly determined by the country’s scientific and economic capacity and intellectual potential, the quality of the people’s life, the development level of democracy, legal awareness and the moral standards prevailing in society. An exceptionally important role in providing these fundamental conditions of society’s prosperity is played by the presence of a responsible and strong intelligentsia.
Yes, a state, any state needs an intelligentsia standing at a high, an adequate development level; it is the form of existence of the nation’s intelligence, which constitutes the foundation of new (first of all) military machinery and equipment. The leaders of society have always known this, while society itself—almost never. But even the leaders rarely realized that the nation’s intellect has development laws of its own, that it is self-sufficient and sets its own goals, and that this is done by learned, i.e., highly original people. First of all, a truly intellectually gifted person is intellectually independent, and this means that he cannot hold biased ideas, adhere to a rigidly preset mode of thinking, follow prescribed behavior. It is this characteristic, which is immanent to the task of building, supporting and developing the country’s intellectual potential, that creates difficulties in mutual understanding and interaction between the intelligentsia as such and broad public opinion.
Performing its main function, the intelligentsia embodies the spirit of doubt, the spirit of negation, the spirit of perpetual opposition to everything, which is precisely what provokes society’s dislike for the intelligentsia as a whole.
Members of the intelligentsia are able to work only feeling that they are working in the community of fellows. They need to have a sense of belonging to a certain realm of spirit and science, a certain scientific and culturological community.
Members of the intelligentsia deserve their name only when and inasmuch as they are professionally engaged in intellectual work. They do not exist outside the edifice of culture, and culture is never built without members of the intelligentsia. In this case, the latter should be viewed as an integral organism, which is united not only genetically, conceptually, methodologically and essentially, but also socially. The intelligentsia needs a favorable social atmosphere, absence of any ideological pressure.
It is quite obvious that in the course of the evolution of human society, the intelligentsia came into being for the purpose of satisfying a broad mix of society’s needs, which constantly gain in complexity.
First of all, we obviously need conscientious and painstaking multiplication of what has already been achieved, an ability to assimilate and reproduce, on a large scale, the result of the best that mankind has created and attained. Along with this sensibly conservative, essentially “preservative” component of the intellectual process, mankind needs and, fortunately, has an innate predisposition for search, for creation, for trying to learn what is not yet known, what is still new and promising.
However, the wish to comprehend the nature of things, the world of material objects and the human soul, and to use the new knowledge to create new technologies, products and services, new modes of the life of individuals and human communities—the wish that is genetically immanent to mankind in general is not present in every individual and not even in most people.
But the spirit and blood of tribal chiefs and shamans, soldiers and sages, poets and philosophers, scientists and artists do not weaken as we move forward along the time scale just because all this is preserved by the intelligentsia taken as a whole.
The amount of culture, the amount of knowledge increase inexorably but not monotonously. New knowledge is obtained by tiny portions by many. Only a few individuals achieve breakthroughs. But these few individuals draw on what has been done by many before them. Of course, one must not forget that “culture is always shaped and achieves more perfect forms by aristocratic selection. Getting more democratic, expanding to embrace new groups, it lowers its standard and can rise again only later, after the human material has been processed.” 6 By processed human material I imply an expansion of the range of those who can and should join the intelligentsia.
Whether left- and right-wing obscurants wish it or not, the intelligentsia will continue to exist for as long as mankind itself exists. Not to fall out of this category, not to find itself outside the human community, Russia should promote its intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia should promote Russia.
In the late 19 th and early 20 th century, the economic conditions of the professionals’ daily life were more or less the same everywhere, and maybe even slightly better in Russia than elsewhere. The economy in its mundane, philistine sense did not matter. Another thing was of importance. The conditions of work in Russia at that time often left much to be desired, but even they did not differ significantly from European and yielded to change under strong and purposeful influences.
The absence of ideological pressure, sharp distinctions in the economics of the standard of living and in the conditions of professional pursuits, the high social status enjoyed by doctors, schoolteachers, engineers, architects and university professors, the decent standard of living of their families, freedom of movement and the slowly but steadily rising level of democracy in society and its ideological, confessional and just human tolerance, the overall sense of being needed by, useful to Russia made it ridiculous to even raise the issue of conflict between the technical and natural scientific intelligentsia, on the one hand, and the authorities and the people, on the other.
It is not easy to fathom the mentality of the intelligentsia working in the humanities, in the liberal arts. There may be difference of opinion about the brilliant galaxy of the 19 th–20th century Russian philosophers. Not all of them by far were philosophers in the full sense of the word, but the issues of morality and religion were examined by them thoroughly and convincingly. Over 250 years, our historians, from V. Tatishchev to G. Vernadsky, built a mighty body of historical knowledge.
Both historians, philosophers, and even those who write about such delicate matters as the spiritual generally and the Russian Orthodox dogma in particular, in fact, created positive knowledge, which is easy to discuss and evaluate. A more complicated issue is the work of writers, reviewers and publicists. I can only say that it was not without their contribution, not without their viewpoint that the people began to view the persons working in the liberal arts, and then the intelligentsia generally, as a class of crafty parasites.
The pre-revolutionary atmosphere was created, and the revolutionary movement was promoted by precisely this segment of the intelligentsia, most of whom did not have a suspicion of what awaited them in the end. One must say that the short-sightedness of the powers that be also promoted the revolutionary cataclysm in no mean degree. Nevertheless, one may assert that the revolution was made by the intelligentsia. This was also admitted by the leader of this victorious revolution V. Ulianov, alias Lenin.
The revolution and then the establishment of Soviet government sharply changed the position of the intelligentsia. The civil war and the atmosphere of the class struggle, which was interpreted in extremely primitive terms, could not but affect the intelligentsia’s attitudes. Despite the inner rejection of Bolshevism or, at best, complete failure to understand what was going on, for most of these people (scientists and specialists) Russia remained Russia, and those who did not emigrate and were not forced to leave the country during the civil war continued to work for the benefit of Russia and Russian statehood. But ideological intolerance was mounting. Consolidation of statehood in the Soviet period took place through centralization and consolidation of power achieved by mass-scale reprisals and ideological purges.
All this created in society at large and among the scientific and engineering community in particular an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear and time-serving, on the one hand, and revolutionary enthusiasm and a sincere wish to uncritically follow the general line of the ruling party and its leader, on the other. For culture, this is practically lethal, because this puts paid either to the intelligentsia itself or to that which makes it the intelligentsia.
The revolution, war and emigration strongly affected the people who had passed through modern highly organized large-scale production and, generally, all literate people. The reserve was constituted by rural dwellers, who were for the most part illiterate. This is why the cultural revolution in Russia, which, one must admit, had long been ripe, began in Soviet times with mass-scale liquidation of illiteracy. Unfortunately, for all its positive aspects, this process also produced adverse consequences. Given the limited resources, expansion of the realm of culture and education inevitably decreases their depth, causes simplification and coarseness, flattens out the cultural, scientific and educational space.
One has to understand that elimination of illiteracy proceeded against the background of the liquidation of the exploiter classes, under the slogan of continuing revolutionary transformations. The primitive vulgar class approach and the class struggle were also introduced, at times quite artificially, into cultural life and the life of the intelligentsia. The revolutionary changes simultaneously stimulated both the emergence of extremist, left-wing and pseudo-advanced trends in culture, science and education. Their genuineness made them more, not less pernicious.
Approximately 20 years after the revolution, things became more or less stationary. Political and ideological nonconformism was suppressed, its vehicles were either banished from the country or physically exterminated. A new intelligentsia, now no longer an alien social group, was created.
A new curious situation was shaped.
Having embarked on the road of autarky, the state could not but pay a great deal of attention to the training of natural scientists and engineers. The opportunities were good. Russia was so large, its resources and capacities seemed so inexhaustible, that autarky appeared easy to achieve. A big system is marked not only by high energy consumption but also by strong inertia. Thousands of young people who join adult life every year saw a mighty and stable system ahead of them. Most people perceived it as such intuitively, without thinking specifically about it. In that situation, gifted young people consciously or (mostly) unconsciously chose research in the natural sciences or an engineering career, joined the “technical” field. In fact, they were predisposed for the type of creative activity whose results could be assessed on the basis of objective criteria free from ideology to the maximum degree. One can perhaps say that this was a kind of “internal emigration” encouraged by society and its leaders.
This is how an intelligentsia with a limited range of interests and inadequate fundamental training (including that in the humanities) appeared in Russia. This is how the country began to suffer from excessive specialization and overproduction of engineers. All this was aggravated by the inertia of ideological intolerance, militarization of science and technology, a lopsided economy and the extensive mode of its development.
For a long time, society had a dual attitude to the intelligentsia. On the one hand, knowledge was respected—an attitude that dated back to Francis Bacon. However, having been trapped by their own rhetoric, our leaders paid lip service to scientific knowledge but were afraid of the genuine intelligentsia. During the so-called period of stagnation, without further ideological ado they just demanded results. And if a scientist needed theoretical research to produce results, he was allowed to engage in it, provided he did not interfere with the ideological foundation.
The intelligentsia is currently not in demand. We no longer depend on it for anything, we’ve got it all—metal, energy, telegraph, telephone, aspirin, quinine, radio, television, railroads, airplanes, cannon and tanks. What has the intelligentsia to do with all this? Even when its members are noticeable, it is only as a nuisance, as something that complicates life unnecessarily. They demand money, they talk about incomprehensible things trying to exaggerate their value, they invent something unthinkable, they predict catastrophes. They are no good, are they?
In actual fact, in the near and mid-term (our economic leaders’ favorite time-periods), in a clearly visible and not too distant future, without the intelligentsia we shall have nowhere to live and no world to feel safe in. This is why sensible leaders grind their teeth and recognize that the intelligentsia is necessary. As for the distant, strategic future, only unpleasantness can be expected from the intelligentsia.
Those who determine the country’s future to the greatest extent should realize that only comprehension of Russia’s history, the specifics of Russian national self-awareness could constitute the foundation of our scientific, technological, state, economic, moral, religious, legal and artistic development, in other words, the development of our civilization. And it is up to our intelligentsia.
One has to realize that the only reforms that could succeed in Russia are ones that help preserve and raise the level and store of original thinking of Russian engineers, researchers, poets, philosophers, managers, generals, industrialists, financiers, doctors, agronomists, lawyers and religious figures. Otherwise, Russia would cease to be a country and become a territory exploited by outside agents and ruled from the outside. For all our wish to become integrated into the world community, national security, interpreted broadly and profoundly enough, requires that Russia should develop a culture of its own, and a culture that would live up to world standard.
Unfortunately, at present a large share of the Russian people, and high-quality specialists at that, have lost national self-awareness, which used to be passed on from generation to generation in a private and, I would even say, patriarchal manner, through the family. The roots have been severed. Many families are looking and often find traces of their ancestors as they are projected to the screen of modern life. But these traces are no more than shadows; to find them, to be able to discern them, to examine them is important but not sufficient by a long chalk. They are silent, these shadows of our ancestors. The “channels” of personal, direct, most effective link with the past are blocked for most of us. The family has become a flat two-dimensional entity without a vertical, in-depth component, especially as regards the rearing of children. This is why a study of our history is essential for the good of each of us and for the good of Russia.
I would like to stress that historically, national self-awareness is impossible in the absence of religious self-awareness. In Russian history, the Russian Orthodox Church did a great deal to promote the tribes’ awareness of their unity, the unity of the land, the unity of the people, the unity of the people and the authorities. At some point, the Russian Orthodox faith was a synonym of everything Russian. This is the reason for the extremely important role of the ecclesiastical intelligentsia in general and its individual representatives in particular.
The history of Russia shows that things went well in the country when, and only when the people professionally engaged in intellectual work (army men, engineers, doctors, clergymen, teachers, administrators) were inspired by the idea of Russian patriotism, which could be understood in a variety of ways. As soon as the intelligentsia became apatriotic, the country plunged into crisis and approached the brink of disaster.
The duty of the intelligentsia is to be the source, vehicle and disseminator of the idea of Russian patriotism interpreted in the entire diversity of its meanings.
A crucial condition of the performance of this duty is, among other things, teaching Russian history as it really was.
I believe that the Russian intelligentsia does not and cannot, in essence, have an existence outside Russian statehood. Generally speaking, one can talk about the intelligentsia only in terms of statehood, of one regime or another. The stronger and more authoritative a regime, the more pronounced the intelligentsia and its place are in the society embraced by the relevant government. Strictly speaking, the intelligentsia exists when, and to the extent to which, the regime exists.
Let us go back to Russia’s component of the concept of Russia’s intelligentsia. It became Russia’s relatively recently, let us say, not more than 100 years ago. Before that, it had been Russian.] As a community of people engaged in intellectual labor, despite all the diversity and even controversy of views on concrete issues of existence, it has always been marked by high patriotism.
The absence of patriotism in a noticeable (even if not by its number, then by the amount of noise) part of the intelligentsia immediately provokes public rejection of the intelligentsia as a whole. When the absence of patriotism or, worse still, militant, hysterical apatriotism, is combined with thoughtless conformism, dislike of the intelligentsia grows.
As for the evaluation “from above”, by the authorities, the intelligentsia is heartily despised for the obscurity of its motives, unpredictability and extreme opinions. The quality that makes the intelligentsia is not easy to grasp. It rudely upsets treasured and accustomed delusions. It speaks the bitter truth. No subject is taboo for it, nor any issue too delicate; it does not recognize authority or sacral truths. This is what is so irritating. This is why it is disliked.
The intelligentsia has a capacity for self-reproduction. It independently determines its development route, it ensures its own continuity, it recruits new talents and trains them for future work.
All this smacks of elitism, but without it, the intelligentsia would be unable to fulfill its mission, to expand and deepen its knowledge about the world and to use this knowledge to advance applied research, which constitutes the basis for the improvement of mass production of goods and services.
Belonging to the elite implies maintaining a high moral and humanitarian standard. Otherwise elitism can become dangerous. Fortunately, a truly humane and well-bred person, a person who has assimilated the best of humanitarian culture is better prepared to assimilate and make an efficient use of specialized knowledge.
The intelligentsia is useful, it can do a great deal of good to the country and the people. And it will remain useful for as long as it retains what makes it the intelligentsia.
Of importance here are, above all, goal-formation and the possibility of an ethical, morally correct choice. Our intelligentsia has to make a choice now. And when and if such a choice is made, it would become possible to restore in public mentality a historically correct view of the national Russian intelligentsia as the country’s patriotic servant.
It is known that a nation that does not want to feed its own army finds that it is feeding a foreign army. Similarly, the people and leaders who refuse to appreciate their own intelligentsia find that they are ruled by foreign intelligence and serve alien interests. To the same extent, an intelligentsia that does not wish to live by the interests of its own country, respect and even venerate it loses its essential quality and is forced to grovel in strange lands.
Translated by Natalia Belskaya
Endnotes
*: RAS Corresponding Member, Chairman of the Higher Examination Board of the Russian Federation. The article is abridged. It was published in full in Russian in the journal Voprosy filosofii, No. 3, 1998. Back.
Note 1: O. Mandelshtam, “On Poetry”, in: The Word and Culture (A Collection), Moscow, 1987. Published for the first time in 1924 in the journal Rossiya, No. 3 (Aug.) (in Russian). Back.
Note 2: Eduard Grafov, “Who Was Who. On Evgeny Shvarts’ Non-Fairy Story The Telephone Directory ”, Izvestiya, No. 148, Aug. 8, 1997. Back.
Note 3: N.S. Khrushchev, Memoirs. Selected Fragments, Moscow, 1997, pp. 499-510 (in Russian). Back.
Note 5: The Lay of Igor’s Host (in Old Russian). Back.
Note 6: N.A. Berdyaev, The Sources and Meaning of Russian Communism, Moscow, 1990, p. 40 (in Russian). Back.