The Thinking Reed

In reality it was Blok, perhaps more than anyone else, who felt the tragic character of what was happening around him. The failure of the revolution as a democratic revolution ominously foreboded its future failure as a social revolution. That was why Blok could not write. After ‘The Twelve’, indeed, the great poet wrote remarkably little. How few verses! To be sure, he wrote articles and gave lectures, but he almost completely stopped writing poetry. This tragedy of a great Russian poet expresses the tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia.

A search for a third way and neutrality in conditions of civil war can seldom be successful, in any case, if its implies some sort of active position. A substantial section of the neutral intelligentsia were obliged to emigrate. Among those who left Russia were the prominent scientists I. Sikorsky, V. Korenchevsky, G. Kistyakovsky, P. Sorokin and V. Leont'ev, and such notable members of the creative intelligentsia as I. Bunin, I. Stravinsky, S. Rakhmaninov, A. Pavlov and F. Chaliapin. The ranks of the émigrés included also the ‘proletarian writer’ Maxim Gorky. Those who stayed in Russia were to a considerable extent demoralized.

The NEP Period

In the period of the New Economic Policy, in connection with the transition from ‘war Communism’ to a more moderate economic line, there was not only a quickening of economic activity in both the state and the private sectors and an improvement in living conditions, but also a certain revival of the Russian intelligentsia: a cultural upsurge. Nobody can deny that for Russian literature, painting, art criticism and spiritual life generally, the twenties were an extremely fruitful epoch. Under the NEP a neutral position towards Bolshevism and the revolution was quite tenable: it entailed no personal catastrophes or inevitable repressions, at any rate so long as only the sphere of culture and science was affected.

The first attempts to induce the intelligentsia to come over to the Bolsheviks had been made already during the war with the Whites. Zhores Medvedev writes:

The real danger of the ‘brain drain’ as a result of civil war and emigration became all too apparent as soon as the Bolsheviks began to take measures to restore industry for military purposes in order to fight the dangerously prolonged civil war. Any large-scale war needs technological support, and civil wars are no exception. The change of attitude towards military and scientific experts became evident from the beginning of 1919 and particularly at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party.73

In this particular case the Bolsheviks were interested primarily in the scientific and technical intelligentsia, whose work began to be supported by the state:

A historian of science might well be astonished by the number of new educational and research institutions created during the most dramatic period of the civil war when the very existence of the Soviet system was seriously at stake.74

The Bolsheviks were justly proud of the material support that they gave to the intelligentsia, despite the difficult conditions prevailing. ‘A professor’s ration’, wrote Pokrovsky, ‘was 136 per cent of that which a worker had to make do with without any supplements, and it was issued with “academic” regularity, more regularly than any others.’75