The Thinking Reed

will serve quite impartially all and every tendency in philosophy, provided only that in these tendencies there is a sense of living search for truth and living thought, not inert marking time in abandoned and outlived positions.80

No political restrictions were imposed. To be sure, Mysl' and Ekonomist were soon suppressed, but some of these journals survived right down to Stalin’s victory and the complete crushing of every form of opposition. Symbolic, in a way, of the twenties were the journals and newspapers produced in the prisons. Numerous unreliable people continued to be held in custody, but they were still allowed freedom of speech and of the press. Journals appeared with expressive titles: Mysl' za reshetkoi [Thought Behind Bars] (Irkutsk), Mysl' zaklyuchennogo [Prisoners’ Thought] (Vitebsk, Omsk and elsewhere), Golos zaklyuchennogo [The Prisoners’ Voice] (Kharkov, Penza, and elsewhere), and others. Quite critical views were expressed in the pages of these journals (and where could the writers be sent for such views?).81 All this compels most historians, even those with a very hostile attitude to the revolution, to write of the ‘situation of relative freedom’ that existed in Russia in the twenties.82

‘After the revolutionary storm came a lull,’ wrote I. Lezhnev in the independent journal Novaya Rossiya,

the bloody fog of war and revolution lifted and went away. The face of the earth could be seen again, and we were at last given our first favourable opportunity to comprehend events in their true historical perspective.83

The new situation enabled one, as was thought at that time, ‘to meditate calmly and historically upon what had happened, to clarify for oneself the lessons and indications of the revolution, and to draw from these appropriate conclusions.’84

Relations between the Bolsheviks and the intelligentsia were, as before, uneasy, but also extremely ambivalent and contradictory. They could be defined as ‘conflict plus co-operation’. The new rulers strove to come to an understanding with members of the intelligentsia, to win their confidence, offering them the maximum of creative freedom within the limits of the revolutionary dictatorship. But their intention was itself contradictory, and it was quite natural that the intelligenty viewed the Bolsheviks with a distrust which was sometimes well founded.

It must be said that the attitude of the Bolsheviks themselves towards the Russian intelligentsia was sometimes condescending, sometimes contemptuous, sometimes condescending with a nuance of contempt. ‘The Russian intelligentsia’, wrote Meshcheryakov in 1922,

did not love the autocracy. Before the 1905 Revolution they even hated it, and fought against it heroically, not sparing their lives. In this struggle they drew together with the proletariat. Along with this the intelligentsia acquired some elements of a socialist world-view. They wrote the word ‘socialism’ on their banner. But in the great majority of cases they intepreted ‘socialism’ purely in their own, ‘intelligentsia’ way. They dreamt of socialism as something very far away, and saw it as beautiful, dazzlingly white and pure, just as, from a distance, the snow-covered Alpine peaks seem virginally pure.85

All this evokes not the slightest sympathy so far as the Bolshevik Meshcheryakov is concerned: he is a man of practical action, with no time for sentiment. For him the intelligentsia is merely a variety of the petty bourgeoisie: