The Thinking Reed

Among Lenin’s comrades the one who took most interest in the problem of the intelligentsia was N.I. Bukharin. He returned to the theme on several occasions, recognizing that the Russian intelligentsia had ‘experienced a very great tragedy’,94 but he was unable to determine the causes of this tragedy. He refused to blame his party in any way, not understanding where the essence of the tragedy lay. He saw this in a contradiction between the intelligentsia’s integrity and love of the people on the one hand, and on the other their refusal to support the people’s revolution. Treating the matter in this way meant that he had not grasped the most important thing. The Bolshevik revolution, which the intelligenty had done so much to prepare, trampled upon the very ideals that had led them to fight against Tsardom in the preceding decades. This was due, of course, not to any ‘evil will’ on the part of the Bolsheviks, who were themselves ‘hostages of history’, but to the objective conditions of the development of Russian society, conditions which in 1917 left no room for democratic decisions. What happened was therefore a tragedy, and one in which the fatal role was played by objective forces. That was something which Bukharin, still upwardly mobile after coming to power, did not yet understand…

No less contradictory was the Bolsheviks’ attitude to culture. This, for example, was what Trotsky wrote on this subject in 1924:

All this brings to my mind a worker of the name of Vorontsov who just after October was detailed to guard Lenin’s person and to help him. As we were preparing to evacuate Petrograd, Vorontsov said to me gravely: ‘If it so happens that they take Petrograd, they might find quite a lot that’s useful… We should put dynamite under the whole city and blow it all up.’ ‘Wouldn’t you regret Petrograd, Comrade Vorontsov?’ I asked, admiring his boldness. ‘What is there to be regretted? When we are back, we shall build something much better.’ I have not invented that brief dialogue, nor have I stylized it. Such as it was, it remained engraved on my memory. That was the correct attitude towards culture.95

What startles us here is not what the Petrograd worker said, but Trotsky’s delight at it.

It is difficult, of course, to require of the people who are creating their destiny through revolution that they show concern for objects the meaning, importance and beauty of which their former masters did not trouble to explain to them,

wrote Novaya Zhizn' in 1918. ‘But we not only can, we must require this of the people’s leaders, of the worker and peasant intelligentsia, of the government organizations and institutions.’96 In reality, however, Trotsky’s remark was typical of the intelligentsia. None other than the singer of ‘the Beautiful Lady’, Alexander Blok, issued this appeal in the revolutionary years:

Do not be afraid of the destruction of the Kremlin, of palaces, pictures and books. They should have been preserved for the people: but, in losing them, the people have not lost everything. A palace which has been destroyed is not a palace. A Kremlin which has been wiped off the face of the earth is not the Kremlin.97