The Thinking Reed

the intelligentsia is in a privileged position compared with the basic classes. Because of the irreducible prerequisites of mental labour in the humanities and the sciences, the intelligentsia has, if not independent political organizations, then at least a functional equivalent to them. The relatively broad extent of academic communication (which certainly surpasses that of the basic groups) enables ideological and political allusions within the limits of the regime’s ideological tolerance to be encoded and decoded regularly.146

One can mention some further advantages enjoyed by the intelligentsia. Being the group that elaborates society’s ideology (Pokrovsky liked to recall that ‘it is the intelligentsia who elaborate it, and nobody else,’147) it arrives sooner than any other at awareness of its own interests. At the same time we must remember that political liberties, which are unquestionably needed by all the working classes, are also a professional necessity for the intelligentsia — their specific interest. Hegedüs writes:

the interest of the members of the intelligentsia — to the extent that they really identify with their function — is related not to any particular institution but to the special field of the creation, application and communication of intellectual values. In this way the particular interest of the intelligentsia is more easily raised to the level of the general interest. This, of course, does not rule out the possibility of particular individuals turning the general interest of the intelligentsia into a special aim of their own, one which would then come into conflict with the general interest. We could instance innumerable examples to prove this, from every field of science, art and education.148

In one way or another the intellectuals, by virtue of their position, become aware more quickly of their common interests, and this in turn promotes their rapid social consolidation.

The fact that the intellectual traditions were preserved was of very great importance, for ‘newcomers’ assimilated them along with the elementary habits of brainwork, whereas the newcomer from the village to the factory bench did not absorb the traditions of the proletariat, since these are not lodged in the technology of production. People who are either incapable or unwilling to assimilate the traditions of the intelligentsia do not remain long in their ranks, but look upon education as a springboard to a bureaucratic career (including one in the bureaucracy of literature). The traditions of the Russian intelligentsia possess distinctive features, and it must be said that the Hungarian sociologists have overlooked that aspect of the matter (unlike British and American scholars, who have seen nothing else). Democratism and criticism have become intrinsic elements of Russian literary thought. Consequently, in our country, as Shatz very rightly observes, ‘literature does not merely attract dissidents, it generates them.’149

We must mention also that despite all the upheavals, the proportion of hereditary intellectuals in 1953-56 and in the sixties was incomparably larger than the proportion of hereditary workers.150 At the same time, the ‘new generations’ came, as a rule, from a semiintellectual milieu. These people, while not actual bearers of the intellectual traditions, did at least share them. This enabled the intelligentsia to accept ‘newcomers’ in large numbers without losing the orderliness of its social structure and its psychological unity.