The Thinking Reed

They do not work for wages but independently of the entrepreneur, receiving payment for their labour either directly from the person they serve or from the capitalist to whom they sell not their labour-power but the finished results of their labour. This circumstance renders such strata of the intelligentsia close… to the petty bourgoisie.86

Consequently, they are drawn to socialism, not by class interests but by ‘study or moral feeling’.87 This last-mentioned fact not only fails to win Meshcheryakov’s approval, it even seems to him suspicious. For Pokrovsky the intelligentsia’s sacrifices in the past inspire no respect: if it did not support the Party in 1917-18, it is nothing but a ‘swamp’ and there is nothing to respect it for.88

The Bolsheviks did not consider themselves native sons of the Russian intelligentsia. Revolutionary democracy had somehow been able to combine practical action with humanistic idealism.89 True, this was difficult even then (we remember Dostoevsky’s criticism of the Narodnik socialists) but nevertheless it was to a certain extent achieved. In general, combining humanistic idealism with Realpolitik is an extremely difficult task; although, perhaps, the future of mankind depends on the success of the attempt.

Be that as it may, we have seen that at the turn of the century the intelligentsia’s loss of its special role as the political vanguard meant that the ‘practical men’, associated with the working class, became separated, in the main, from the ‘humanists’, and the political movement from the movement of ideas. Everything that followed seemed to confirm the rightness of the ‘practicáis’. Even then, however, the moral superiority of the ‘idealists’ remained indubitable — in their own eyes, at any rate. Subsequent experience showed that the Bolsheviks were wrong to disdain the warnings of the ‘petty-bourgeois’ humanists (among whom were such major Marxist theoreticians as Martov). But at the beginning of the twenties there were few who were able to conceive that after the revolution of 1917 there could come the terror of 1937. For most people, the bloody upheavals were all behind them and what lay ahead was a process of reaping the results thereof.

Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and the Intelligenty

In those years the Bolsheviks argued amongst themselves a lot about the intelligentsia. Some rejoiced that ‘the Russian intelligentsia will rise no more… Its culture will not rise again… And within twenty or thirty years the tribe of intelligenty will have vanished from the surface of the Russian land.’90 Others regretted the fate of the intelligentsia but declined to take responsibility for what had happened, saying that the breach between the intelligentsia and the revolution was due either to the former’s petty-bourgeois nature or to a ‘tragic misunderstanding’.91 Lenin also often thought about this problem. Voytolovsky even claims that ‘concern about the historical role of the Russian intelligentsia had for a long time given Lenin no rest.’92 But Lenin was nevertheless unable to work out a unified conception of this role. ‘We are startled by his sudden shifts from praise to blame,’ admits Voytolovsky93 when he summarizes a number of Lenin’s statements on the subject. He explains this by Lenin’s drawing a sharp line between the bourgeois and the socialist intelligentsia. That may be so, but it shows, then, that he, unlike younger Marxists — Martov and, later, Gramsci — did not perceive the intelligentsia as an integral entity, as an independent social stratum which, despite the complex and even motley nature of its composition, was able to elaborate a common ‘intelligentsia’ culture, ideology and psychology.