The Thinking Reed

This nihilism was part of a peculiarly ‘intelligentsia’ social idealism, carried to extremes, which enabled a Europeanized intelligent to like the way the peasants, out of ignorance, destroyed buildings which later they themselves, perhaps, would regret having destroyed. For Blok and Trotsky the act of destruction was itself transformed into an aesthetically creative act. However, no actual palace was being demolished, no actual book burnt. They conceived destruction very abstractly and speculatively, as the pure idea of ‘creative’ destruction rather than as practical activity.98

Obviously the ideologues of Bolshevism, who were themselves intelligenty, rejected the value of the culture of the past not out of ignorance but because they regarded themselves as the bearers of more important values. When reproached for not wanting Shakespeare or Molière, they protested: ‘But how can you put it like that? Shakespeare and Molière fulfilled their historical mission, and now they are of interest to the proletariat mainly from the historical standpoint.’99 We shall see later that Lenin — probably the first to do this among the party theoreticians — began to concern himself with the ideological rehabilitation of culture: at first, to be sure, in its role as a social instrument.

The final débâcle of the intelligentsia and the impoverishment of spiritual culture threatened to destroy the foundations of Russian civilization, and it was precisely these foundations that Lenin and his comrades were striving, above all, to preserve and defend. Accordingly, Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin barred the way before their left-radical colleagues who tried to finish off the Russian intelligentsia so as to have a clear space on which to erect a ‘proletarian culture’. Lenin categorically opposed those efforts, saying:

we hear people dilating at too great length and too flippantly on ‘proletarian’ culture. For a start, we should be satisfied with real bourgeois culture; for a start, we should be glad to dispense with the cruder types of pre-bourgeois culture, i.e., bureaucratic culture or serf culture, etc.100

After all, Lenin observed, ‘At a time when we hold forth on proletarian culture and the relation in which it stands to bourgeois culture, facts and figures reveal that we are in a very bad way even as far as bourgeois culture is concerned.’101 Trotsky spoke out no less resolutely:

There can be no question of the creation of a new culture, that is, of construction on a large historic scale during the period of dictatorship. The cultural reconstruction which will begin when the need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unparalleled in history will have disappeared will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any, and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The proletariat acquired power for the purpose of doing away for ever with class culture and to make way for human culture.102