Intelligentsia Ideology:
The King is Dead! Long Live the King?

Katerina Clark

Slavic & Comparative Literature
Yale University

The Russian intelligentsia, a self-proclaimed interest group that emerged in the nineteenth century, always considered themselves a unique and indigenous body with privileged access to truth; they were not just "intellectuals," an occupational category, but an "intelligentsia," a special group. Many of them shared a mission to save the country from the state's oppression and mismanagement. With the demise of the Soviet Union, however, the identity (and even existence) of the intelligentsia has been threatened. There are several factors contributing to its perilous state, including a general scarcity of state funds, problems in finding alternative sources of patronage in a chaotic, proto-capitalist world, and the tremendous adjustment from established patterns of conformity or dissidence to the state. My paper will argue that the real crisis for the Russian intelligentsia has come less from local factors, such as a shortage of funds, than from broader changes in the world at large which also contributed to the demise of the Soviet state itself.

During the Soviet period, the Russian intelligentsia were closely implicated in the state, both institutionally, and in certain senses ideologically. Such a contention might seem surprising, given the regime's well-documented persecution of individual intellectuals and the fact that pockets of intellectuals provided the main known centers of Soviet dissidence. However, the intelligentsia and the regime were both driven by a sense of sacred mission. Though both groups conceived that mission a little differently, their conceptions were in each case informed by two defining features. The first of these was a phobia of market forces which were seen as threatening the purity of political and cultural life. Though this deep-seated prejudice has made problematical many intellectuals' adjustment to post-Soviet society, their identity has been more formidably challenged by a second, related cluster of beliefs.

The traditional Russian intelligentsia grew up around a lettered culture. In the Soviet period, many of its assumptions were adopted to a hyperbolic degree by both intellectuals and the state. The intellectuals' faith in the sacrality of the written text, epitomized in the famous quotation from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, "Manuscripts don't burn," was shared by the Stalinist regime. Both groups sought to create and preserve the perfect text, one reason why censorship was so central to Soviet intellectual life Stalin enjoyed the ritual role of ultimate author, but more often exercised the related role of ultimate editor. Gorky, titular head of Soviet literature, was given an extraordinarily elevated role in the state pantheon as Stalin's great "friend"; at his death in 1936, the loss was declared in official accounts the greatest for the country after that of Lenin. This cult of letters was at its height in the thirties, the decade of High Stalinism, but was characteristic throughout the Soviet period. Even after Stalin died in 1953, during the period of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev and then the Brezhnev years, literary texts played a key role in defining the national agenda.

The Soviet Union collapsed in an historical moment when, throughout the world, the power of print-based culture was eroding. Within the country, this reality had been largely obscured, even under Gorbachev. His was a time of print culture euphoria when intellectual journals enjoyed a heyday with huge subscriptions. A preoccupation then was filling in the "blank spaces" of the nation's political and cultural history, restoring all those non-persons, non-events and proscribed texts to the national record. However, the very notion of the "blank space" to be filled in with specific material suggests the fixity of some master text, a sense of reality that was already being undermined as the electronic media were making inroads on intellectual life. And as, with collapse of the Soviet Union, the intelligentsia were thrust into a global intellectual economy, their sense of unique identity was even further challenged.