The Thinking Reed

Thus, on the eve of the Russian Revolution the proletariat was the vanguard of the freedom movement. The intelligentsia, although retaining its democratic sympathies and critical attitude to the autocracy, was yielding up its position at the forefront. ‘Revolution’, wrote Trotsky, ‘was no longer a privileged avocation in intellectual circles. The number of workers arrested was increasing. It was easier to breathe in the prisons, despite the overcrowding.’63 The revolutionary intelligenty were already acting as representatives of the workers: they not only spoke in their name but were indeed strong in the strength of the working class and its consciousness. Their ideas were already shared by the masses. At the same time another section of the intelligentsia was withdrawing, to a considerable extent, from the revolutionary movement and becoming depoliticized. Although this section did not become alien to politics or revolution, these were no longer the matters it saw as fundamental. That is why the most characteristic figures of the period are Lenin and Chekhov. The writer and the social leader were no longer united in one person.

Nevertheless, the intelligentsia played no small role in our twentieth-century revolutions. ‘Lenin, Trotsky and other intelligenty’, writes Brym, ‘loom large in accounts of the Russian Revolution; the worker and peasant often disappear from sight as we make our way through the web of political intrigue and ideological conflict in which the intelligentsia was entangled.’64 The Social Democrats undoubtedly relied upon working-class support; without that support they would have achieved nothing. But, wrote Pokrovsky, ‘even when the idea of a workers’ party had come into existence and this party was being built, the leading role nevertheless belonged to the revolutionary intelligentsia.’65 When the twentieth century began, ‘the intelligentsia found the masses’, but the masses were only beginning to act as an independent political force:66

The fact that before 1905, despite Comrade Lenin’s demand that the committees should be made up of two intellectuals and eight workers, the committees still consisted of eight intellectuals and two workers, is something that cannot be denied. Comrade Lenin was a thousand times right when he called for the proportions to be revised, but this reversal was a postulate, was what he wanted, while reality was such that Akselrod had some grounds for calling our party in that period a party of boy and girl students.67

It was important, though, that all these students were already able to find support among the workers. As for the overwhelming majority of the intelligenty, who remained outside the Social Democratic Party (or, more precisely, parties, for the Russian Social Democrats split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the very period when they were trying to create a united organization), they supported other left-wing parties. A large section of the intelligentsia followed the Social Revolutionaries, while another group formed the left wing of the Constitutional-Democratic Party (the ‘Cadets’). It was typical of the time, too, that even among members of this essentially ‘left-centre’ party there were many supporters of socialism who while considering, in Milyukov’s words, the socialization of industry and the nationalization of the land ‘to be beyond the bounds of practical politics’, yet did not reject these ideas in principle. Milyukov himself, speaking of the socialists, said: ‘like them, we stand on the left wing of the Russian political movement.’68 Thus intellectual liberalism in Russia was altogether unlike the usual bourgeois liberalism. This is recognized also by Western writers. Tompkins writes:

We are inclined to use the term ‘liberal’ casually, as if we knew exactly what it means. It is sometimes associated with the bourgeoisie, as though the middle class had a monopoly on ‘liberalism’. It may at times be equated with radicalism, or even with socialism.69

Something like that happened with the Left Cadet intelligentsia which was fighting against Russian Tsarism.

Vekhi and the Crisis of the Intelligentsia