INTELLIGENTSIA.

Coined a century and a half ago in Russia, the term intelligentsia has known both a subjective and an objective meaning. Broadly speaking the word was originally conceived in terms of principle. It referred to a group characterized by a critical attitude toward social reality and an oppositional political stance. Later the term became defined as a matter of profession, encompassing those with a higher education. Intelligentsia as a concept thus bears some relation to the later and more familiar term intellectuals, but the two notions overlap only partially. The line of division between the subjective and the objective usage of the term runs approximately between the imperial and the Soviet period. As for the post-Soviet intelligentsia, it is still a phenomenon in search of self-definition.

Peter Boborykin, a Russian novelist of the 1860s, claimed authorship of the term intelligentsia, although there have been competing claims of earlier usage in Polish, German, and even in Russian. The word was immediately applied retroactively. Borrowing from Ivan Turgenev's novel Otsi i Deti (1862; Fathers and Children, sometimes incorrectly translated as Fathers and Sons), historians identified a first generation of intelligentsia "fathers," the "superfluous men" of the 1830s and 1840s, members of the gentry raised on German idealist philosophy and desirous of social reform but timorous and impotent in an era of harsh political reaction. The "fathers" have been counterposed to the "sons," meaning both men and women of the 1860s, who were more diverse in their social origins, positivists intellectually, drawn to the natural sciences, more radical politically than their elders, and frustrated by the inadequate reforms that followed Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1856).

By the turn of the twentieth century, the generation of intelligentsia "grandchildren" was already shifting from a self-understanding founded on opposition to the autocratic tsarist regime toward one based on professional occupation in a rapidly modernizing country. This redefinition was related to the explosion in the number of putative or potential members of the intelligentsia. Whereas in the 1840s the whole Russian Empire contained no more than a few thousand students, by the time of its first reliable census in 1897 Russia counted nearly a million educated individuals. Historians have invoked this transformation, as well as the admittedly timid liberalization of Russian society after 1905, to explain the decline in the critical posture of the intelligentsia. A marker of this reorientation is the collection of essays entitled Vekhi (1909; Landmarks), a self-critical repudiation of the revolutionary tradition by some of Russia's leading formerly radical Marxist intellectuals, such as Nikolai Berdyayev and Peter Struve.

According to a dominant narrative of Russian history, the year 1917 represented a historic test for the classic intelligentsia, entrusted with the task of creating a progressive order in Russia. Its failure to do so in the few months between the fall of tsarism and the Bolshevik seizure of power discredited the entire intelligentsia tradition along with its politicians of the time, such as the liberal conservative Prince Lvov, first prime minister of the provisional government; the foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, eminent liberal intellectual and member of the Constitutional Democratic Party; and the last pre-Bolshevik prime minister, the Socialist Revolutionary lawyer Alexander Kerensky. The outcome of events in 1917 opened a debate that still continues over the responsibility of the classic intelligentsia, with its aversion to state power and high-minded ineffectiveness, for Bolshevik success and for the ensuing Soviet regime.

Soviet Russia could also be considered a creation of the classic revolutionary intelligentsia. In spite of their workers' ideology and their appeal to the peasantry, early Bolshevik leaders have been depicted by their critics as simply successors to the most extreme or "nihilistic" earlier trends in the intelligentsia. Most Bolshevik leaders were indeed educated individuals thoroughly imbued with the intelligentsia ethos of uncompromising, principled opposition to the ancien régime and a utopian vision for the future. Vladimir Lenin himself, though scornful of intelligentsia fecklessness, valued professional skills, considering these to be the essential material basis of socialism. Many members of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia emigrated from Russia or withdrew from professional and political activity after 1917. Some, however, particularly those with technical competencies, entered Soviet service, willingly or reluctantly. By April 1919 almost five thousand doctors were serving in the Red Army. A year later the army included some fifty thousand former generals and other higher-level tsarist officers. This alliance between the old intelligentsia and the new state lasted until the end of the 1920s. Passage from the moderate NEP (New Economic Policy) to a policy of intensive industrialization and collectivization brought the prominent role of the old intelligentsia to an end. The 1928 show trial of fifty-three engineers and miners announced its imminent disappearance. By 1933 only 17 percent of the Soviet intelligentsia consisted of former bourgeois specialists. Their ranks had been depleted by further emigration, natural attrition, and purges. Above all, they had been flooded by the emergence of a new socialist intelligentsia.

From the very outset, the Soviet regime was determined to create its own intelligentsia. By 1919 it had opened rabfaks (rabochiye fakultety, or "workers faculties") at every institution of higher education. Here, workers and peasants with only basic schooling received an accelerated higher education. By 1933 half of the students in universities were of worker or peasant background, though this figure fell later. The proletarianization or, as some have called it, the plebianization of the intelligentsia had been successfully carried out.

Soviet ideology soon formulated a new conception of the intelligentsia: "a social stratum consisting of people professionally occupied with mental work.… Being a stratum and not a class the intelligentsia is incapable of playing an independent political role in social life" (Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopedia, 2nd ed., 1953, vol. 18, p. 270). Article 1 of the 1977 Soviet constitution proclaimed "a socialist state of the whole people, expressing the will and interests of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia. …" At this time the intelligentsia, in the Soviet sense, numbered more than thirty million individuals. Overall it was almost evenly divided between men and women; two-thirds of engineers, the numerically most important profession, were men whereas a similar proportion of doctors were women. Russians and Jews who numbered, respectively, 53 percent and 0.9 percent of the population accounted for 67 percent and 7.1 percent of scientific workers. Mathematicians and physicists enjoyed the highest professional prestige.

What became of the oppositional ethos of the classic intelligentsia? Stirrings in Russian culture after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and hopes raised by Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization between 1956 and 1964 gave rise to a dissident movement founded on liberal, Christian, or socialist values. Regardless of the attention and support afforded the movement in the West, dissidents represented an infinitesimally small group. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, there is no evidence that they enjoyed sympathy throughout society. Dissidents, or inakomysliashchie (those who think otherwise), did however represent the tip of a much wider phenomenon, the shestidesyatniki, (the people of the [nineteen] sixties). This was the generation whose hopes had been raised under Khrushchev only to be frustrated for two decades during the era of Brezhnevite zastoi (stagnation). In a sense Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, bore the aspirations of the shestidesyatniki. Though the Soviet intelligentsia never succumbed to Western-style "Gorbymania," it initially offered him its support. Disappointed with Gorbachev's halfhearted and unsuccessful measures, by 1991 the intelligentsia had transferred its allegiance to the new president of the soon-to-be independent Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.

Disorientation best characterizes the situation of the post-Soviet intelligentsia, even though intelligentovedenie (the study of the intelligentsia) has become a thriving academic subfield with its own institute and innumerable publications. Russia's integration into the world economy guarantees the continued growth and importance of the educated population. Debate continues, however, over the role of the intelligentsia, its critical function, and its social mission. Critics argue that wholesale privatization has also meant the privatization of knowledge and therefore the disappearance of a classic intelligentsia. Alexander Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the abyss between the narod (people) and the intelligentsia, attributing it to betrayal by a self-infatuated, opportunistic, and impious intelligentsia that possesses only obrazovshchina (book knowledge) rather than moral values. Yabloko (Apple), the party of the post-Soviet liberal and westernized intelligentsia, has done so poorly that it does not count on the political map.

Through its management of public opinion, its manipulation of the media and of national values, the Vladimir Putin regime has succeeded in co-opting a good part of the independent-minded intelligentsia. Already discredited by its identification with Yeltsin's disastrous economic reforms and his political misbehavior, that part of the intelligentsia that might play a critical role has largely withdrawn to nonpolitical and often lucrative activities. In the atmosphere of early-twenty-first-century Russia, even kulturnost (the quality of being cultivated or well-mannered and educated), recognized by Soviet sociologists as an intelligentsia trait, has retreated into the background. Is this the end of the intelligentsia, in its classic subjective meaning, as a group founded on moral principle and a critical sense? The question is widely debated in early-twenty-first-century Russia, suggesting that something of the ethos of the original intelligentsia persists.

See alsoGorbachev, Mikhail; Khrushchev, Nikita; New Economic Policy (NEP); Putin, Vladimir; Soviet Union; Yeltsin, Boris.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Churchward, Lloyd G . The Soviet Intelligentsia: An Essay on the Social Structure and Roles of Soviet Intellectuals during the 1960s. London, 1973.

Markiewicz-Lagneau, Janina. "La fin de l'intelligentsia? Formation et différenciation de l'intelligentsia sovié-tique." Revue d'études comparative est/ouest 7, no. 4 (December 1976): 7–72.

Pipes, Richard, ed. The Russian Intelligentsia. New York, 1961.

Sinyavsky, Andrei. The Russian Intelligentsia. New York, 1997.

Andre Liebich