The Thinking Reed

The intelligentsia has ceased to be a superior elite standing somewhere on the periphery of society and, as a result, relatively autonomous in relation to it and engaged in seeking to look at society ‘from without’, so to speak. It has become a very important component of society, inside the basic social classes and along with them.54

Following Gnedin and, like him, drawing upon the young Marx, Kon criticizes the bureaucratic hierarchy and shows how it stands in opposition to the intelligentsia and to intellect in general. The bureaucracy sees the work of the intelligentsia as merely a means to the attainment of its own aims. Consequently it tries to subordinate to itself other people’s minds, other people’s knowledge, imposing extraneous tasks upon them. The intelligentsia’s reply to the bureaucrats’ policy takes the form of outbreaks of student rioting and the growth of the New Left (France and Poland both provide examples). Protest against alienation leads to revolutionary action.

Of course, the revolt of the New Left in the West took place in quite different conditions from those in the USSR. The Western intellectuals rebelled against ‘repressive tolerance’, whereas the Russians suffered from a much more repressive intolerance. ‘Paradoxically, these differing conditions tend to have a similar effect on the political attitudes of the intellectuals of the two countries,’ write Brzezinski and Huntington, comparing the intelligentsias of the USSR and the USA. ‘In both cases they stimulate the sense of political frustration or even alienation.’55 However, the American scholars also mentioned what seemed to them another paradox. The American intellectual protests against the alienation, the counterposing of people to one another in bourgeois industrial society, whereas the Soviet intellectual is revolted by official collectivism: ‘The alienated American attempts to escape into just exactly what the alienated Soviet citizen attempts to escape from.’56 But this contradiction is only apparent. Soviet official collectivism does not really unite people: on the contrary, it alienates them to an even greater degree than ‘the American way of life’ or capitalist competition. It unites people with false, formal, obligatory bonds which are substituted for the natural ones and thereby prevents genuine informal human unity. It is no accident that horizontal bonds within all Soviet organizations (trade union, ‘Party’, and so on), between individual members or particular groups, are not only not provided for but are actually condemned. Under totalitarian collectivism every member of society is subject to ‘the leadership’ and counterposed to the other members. And nowhere is a person so lonely and isolated as in a collective where only despite official policy can informal bonds be established between individuals, as against those which are imposed upon them.57 It was natural, therefore, that the Soviet intelligentsia’s protest against alienation was in many ways similar to the protest of the Western New Left — not in form, but in content.

The experience of the New Left movement at the end of the sixties attracted much attention from Kon and Gnedin and other theoreticians of the Novy Mir circle (for example, L. Kopelev and R. Orlova). But in the West and in Poland in spring 1968 there was a political crisis. What was to be done, though, in a period of reaction, when the power of the ruling group was being consolidated and stabilized? What was to be done in a period of social stagnation? And that was what had arrived in the USSR, after the period of reform.

Political crisis activates the masses, but in a period of social stagnation, when there is no hope of political changes, the masses withdraw from politics:

The atmosphere of intellectual terror and the absence of a new ideology led to the impoverishment of political life and the increase of civic apathy. Many, especially young people, ceased to interest themselves in politics and went off into the world of private interests and experiences.58

However, this de-ideologizing of the masses also meant a crisis of the official ideology. A period of apathy and stagnation is historically necessary: it precedes a fresh, authentic revolutionary upsurge: