INTELLIGENTSIA

The concept of the intelligentsia was nurtured, challenged, and revitalized in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Used to describe a group of politically engaged intellectuals, the term spread from its east European origins and enjoyed a strong grip on the imagination and social science in much of the world for the next hundred years. Definitions of the intelligentsia, the imputed characteristics of its members, and the consequences of their actions inspired controversies from the start. The category has no fixed meaning in part because its founding assumption—that intellectuals have superior insight into the goals and means of politics—gives rise to conflicts, both about the claim itself and about the content of these goals and means. Nonetheless, intellectuals' own quarrels over who is in and who is out of the intelligentsia, as well as over its merits or demerits, have kept the concept alive as a proposition, if not a coherent social formation, for well more than a century.

The word intelligentsia was used in Polish political literature in the 1840s, although R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, the author of an influential two-volume work, The History of Russian Social Thought (1906), claimed that the term had first been used in the 1860s by a minor Russian novelist. The rich medium of creativity and political disappointment of early-twentieth-century Russia produced compelling self-definitions and controversies around the concept. Ivanov-Razumnik's study, subtitled "Individualism and Philistinism in Russian Literature and Life of the Nineteenth Century," gave the Russian intelligentsia a definition and a history, linked to each other. Hisargument was that intelligenty (intellectuals) were "irreconcilably hostile" to the petty materialism of philistine life. The intelligentsia was an "ethically anti-Philistine, sociologically non-estate, non-class historically continuous group, characterized by the creation of new forms and ideals and putting these into practice in a tendency toward physical and mental, social and individual liberation of the personality" (Ivanov-Razumnik, vol. 1, p. 12). Values, creativity, activism, and membership in a group with a history—but not class or social estate—were postulated as core elements of an intelligentsia tradition.

What values? Not coincidentally, the word translated above as "Philistinism"—meshchantsvo—is related to merchants and small-scale marketing in Russian. Ivanov-Razumnik, and other Russian creators of the intelligentsia's mythology, regarded capitalism, commerce, and materialism as inimical to freedom, creativity, and social well-being. The association of the intelligentsia with an anticapitalist stance was one consequence of the group's self-definition at a time of rapid and, for some intellectuals, disturbing expansion of industrial production, commercial agriculture, and wage labor in Russia.

Anticapitalism was not the only, or even the necessary, condition of membership in the intelligentsia, however. Russian writers of different political and cultural perspectives—liberals, such as Pavel N. Milyukov, and Marxists, including Yuli Martov and Georgy Plekhanov—brought varieties of opposition to Russia's autocratic state in under the intelligentsia umbrella. For many commentators, the intelligentsia tradition began in the eighteenth century, when Alexander Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov published and were punished for their criticisms of Russian government and society. The genealogy continued through the middle of the nineteenth century, highlighted by the nobles associated with the failed Decembrist coup (1825), debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers, the literary commentaries of Vissarion Belinsky, the pessimistic reflections of Peter Chaadayev, and the eclectic writings of Alexander Herzen. The second half of the century added to the list critical publicists such as Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, social theorists such as Peter Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovsky, and activists in the name of various causes—Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism, Plekhanov's Marxism. Writers and sometimes their literary creations were made part of this trajectory. Bazarov, the protagonist of Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862), was a controversial "nihilist" hero for the 1860s and later. What held this chain of many metals together were three qualities: opposition to the state, the claim to speak for the welfare of the polity, and persecution. The intelligentsia ideal—expressed by historical personalities or literary creations—was personal sacrifice for the cause of the general good, expressed in words or actions directed against the state.

In the early twentieth century, three developments heightened controversies over who was in and who was out of the intelligentsia and simultaneously promoted the retrospective reconstruction of this "historically continuous group." One challenge was the growth of an educated society and the expansion of the liberal professions. The concerns of Russia's artists and journalists encompassed a wide array of interests, including fascinations that strayed far from the realist and positivist hegemonies of the previous century. A second challenge was the attraction of Russian intellectuals to neo-idealist and religious ideas, which eroded the earlier appeal of positivism and Marxism. A third challenge was fragmentation and contention within the political movements that had taken shape in the 1890s. The Social Democrats split into factions only a few years after their founding congress; later, even prominent Bolshevik intellectuals were attracted to antimaterialist philosophies.

Vladimir Lenin's 1902 pamphlet "What Is to Be Done?" can be read against this background as one of several assertions of the intelligentsia's importance. In Lenin's formulation, intellectuals, "educated representatives of the propertied classes," were essential to the formation of class consciousness among workers and thus to the triumph of socialism. Another then-obscure veteran of the Marxist labor movement of the 1890s, Jan Wac?aw Machajski, formulated a more sinister view of the intelligentsia as a class of "intellectual workers" who through their monopoly on education would manipulate socialism in their own interest. Once in power in a socialist regime, Machajski predicted, the intelligentsia would constitute a new ruling class.

The failure of the Revolution of 1905 to bring socialism, liberalism, or even representative government to life in an uncompromised manner, as well as the extensive liberalization of rules on the press, only abetted controversies over the intelligentsia. Was the intelligentsia a forceful and constructive element of Russian politics? This question roiled Russian society in 1909, when a group of prominent intellectuals, most of them ex-Marxist converts to neo-idealism, published Vekhi (Landmarks), a radical critique of the intelligentsia and a repudiation of its (presumed) traditions. The contributors to Vekhi, including the philosophers Nikolai Berdyayev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Semyon L. Frank, and the liberal nationalist Peter Struve, lambasted the intelligentsia for its narrow-minded positivism, its intolerant atheism, its fixation on revolutionary politics, and its disregard for moral principles, for law, and for personal responsibility. Bogdan Kistyakovsky castigated Plekhanov for his relativist slogan, "The success of the revolution is the highest law." Written in the bitter aftermath of 1905, during a rash of political assassinations, and in the face of the apparent incapacity of officials and elected representatives to work together in the Duma, the Vekhi group's harsh critique took the unusual step of placing a good share of the responsibility for Russia's troubles on the intelligentsia itself.

The intelligentsia—both radicals and reformists—struck back, with an outburst of publications that contradicted each other and simultaneously confirmed that, at least for its defenders, the intelligentsia was alive and kicking. But the Vekhi controversy clarified some aspects of intelligentsia myth-making. First, the myth was still powerful enough to inspire culture wars over the nature of the intelligentsia and its goals and principles, and second, it was a myth—not a socially definable reality, not an identifiable political program. Battles over what the intelligentsia was, combined with a relentless insistence that its values did matter, sustained the Russian intelligentsia as a cultural project into the years of war and revolution. But it was one cultural project among many, until the revolution of 1917 put the Russian intelligentsia on the world stage and up for reinterpretation once again.

From that time [the 1860s], the Russian intelligent sia becomes non-estate, non-class based, not only in its tasks, goals, ideals, but also in its composi tion, and, at the same time—of course a not accidental coincidence—the term intelligentsia itself appears in the present sense of the word. (R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, 1906)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia continued to accumulate meanings, both positive and negative. Within the Soviet Union, the word was used at least three ways. One designation was simply "white-collar labor"; it employed Machajski's functionalist definition but not his critical stance to distinguish mental workers from physical ones. A second usage referred to the heroic tradition of the prerevolutionary past, now firmly fixed on a trajectory toward Bolshevik-led victory in 1917: who was in and who was out depended on officially defined linkages to the revolution. In yet another variant of the older term, some used it to describe dissident critics of the Soviet state.

Outside the Soviet Union, perspectives were similarly tied to politics. Reformers and revolutionaries attracted to the apparent victory of intellectuals and their progressive cause in Russia embraced the category for themselves, particularly the notion of political engagement. Others saw danger in intellectuals' applying their ideas to worldly politics: the French philosopher Julien Benda's The Treason of the Clerks (1927) was an early expression of a long line of cautionary critiques of intelligentsia activism and its outcomes. Two of the most influential social treatments of the intelligentsia were those of the German sociologist Karl Mannheim and the Italian politician Antonio Gramsci. Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia (1929) described intellectuals as floating "free" from their class position and as producers of a "scientific" politics. Gramsci split the intelligentsia into two camps: organic intellectuals who defended the interests of their own class and "traditional intellectuals" whose allegiance could be captured for the revolutionary cause.

By the 1950s, intellectuals who had direct experience of communist rule managed to reintroduce critical interpretations of the intelligentsia. The Yugoslav political leader and writer Milovan Djilas argued that the intelligentsia in Eastern Europe had become the managerial elite—the "new class"—of communism. Djilas, like Leon Trotsky (The Revolution Betrayed, 1937) and the Hungarian sociologists George Konrád and Ivan Szelenyi (The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1979), brought back to life Machajski's prerevolutionary warnings. Debates over the consequences of communist rule and intellectuals' responsibility for them continued after the collapse of the Soviet regimes in 1989 and 1991. In this post-Soviet context, theoretical interest in the "public sphere" or "civil society" eclipsed attention to the intelligentsia, perhaps only temporarily if one considers the circumstances of its origins.

See alsoAnarchism; Civil Society; Intellectuals; Radicalism.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Ivanov-Razumnik, R. V. Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli. 2 vols. 3rd ed. St. Petersburg, 1911.

Miliukov, Pavel N. Outlines of Russian Culture. 3 vols. Edited by Michael Karpovich. Translated by Valentine Ughet and Eleanor Davis. Philadelphia, 1942. Reprint, New York, 1960. Abridged translation of Ocherki poistorii russkoi kul'tury, multiple editions, 1896–1918.

Secondary Sources

Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly. New York, 1978.

Burbank, Jane. "Were the Russian Intelligenty Organic Intellectuals?" In Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform, edited by Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid, 97–120. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Read, Christopher. Religion, Revolution, and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The "Vekhi" Debate and Its Intellectual Background. London, 1979.

Shatz, Marshall S. Jan Wac?aw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism. Pittsburgh, Pa., 1989.

Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism. Translated by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Stanford, Calif., 1979.

Jane Burbank