The Thinking Reed

At the same time social pressure on the intelligentsia has increased and this has to a certain extent promoted its consolidation, its development of group-consciousness. Furthermore the intellectuals, feeling that they belong to the oppressed and exploited masses, increasingly claim the right to speak in their name. They enjoy greater access to information (even in the USSR, and other societies of the Soviet type, learned publications offer the reader many facts and ideas which are excluded from popular publications) and consequently are better able to express themselves. This is why, incidentally, oppositions first take shape in the setting of legal culture and only later does the logic of the movement, the barriers of censorship, and the impossibility of saying everything one wants to say impel the intelligentsia to take the path of activity which is ‘illegal’ from the standpoint of the official bureaucrats. ‘Samizdat’ appears, together with underground universities and clandestine seminars. This ‘illegal’ culture98 is always a prolongation and product of legal culture.

It is precisely the pressure exercised by the authorities upon an intellectual in the course of his quite legal professional activity that first evokes his protest. Workers and engineers have to carry out tasks imposed by others, eight hours a day. Their personality is subjected to alienation during their work, and they try to make up for that in their leisure time. The creative process of the scientist or the writer is uninterrupted (purely technical work in the laboratory or at the desk is only part of it). But this being so, if the process in question is subject to control by an exploiting bureaucracy (and control of the result implies control of the process), the writer’s personality is even more alienated than that of the worker, and it is even harder for him to ‘remain himself.

The statocratic master tells the intellectual in advance what is wanted from him, what he must reveal, what he must write about, what he must depict. Consequently — at any rate, so long as he resigns himself to submitting to the will of the ‘boss’ — the intellectual’s activity is determined not by the objective logic of science or art, not by society as a whole, but merely by the administrative job he has to perform. In the post-Stalin period, moreover, this problem has become even more acute for writers than it is for scientists. Marat Cheshkov wrote quite correctly that under statocratic rule, and in general in present-day industrial society, alienation of the product of the intellectual’s labour becomes transformed into direct alienation of his personality.

But of course, it is not only protest against alienation and proletarianization that motivates intellectuals. Their actual exploitation grows steadily more severe. The statocratic state is in the position of a monopolist who can dictate conditions to the wage-workers. As a result the material position of most scientists, writers, actors and intellectuals in the USSR has become worse — as a whole, that is, of course — than that of their colleagues in the West. An exception must be made, however, for those bureaucrats of culture or science who perform official propaganda functions, completely accepting the rules of the game and refraining from independent creative work. Although these people contribute nothing of practical benefit to society, their books, which nobody reads, are printed in many thousands of copies. For the sake of propaganda the state accepts losses. Such pseudo-intellectuals are for practical purposes integrated into the lowest level of the ruling statocracy, with all the consequences this entails. But it must be realized that in this field there are always fewer vacancies than applicants. The result is that many of these people get thrown overboard, even though they have accepted the rules of the game. Unfortunately, talentless people and mediocrities are more numerous in our country than the bureaucratic posts for them to fill.

At first, until the mid 1930s, although the intelligentsia were in the position of wage-workers they retained some economic privileges. It was typical that when the onslaught on the old specialists began, as Roy Medvedev writes, ‘their material position was, for the most part, better at the time of their arrest than before the Revolution.’99 The intelligentsia was not yet very numerous; the rulers had need of it and shared with it a part of the statocratic surplus product. But the increase in the number of people with higher education meant also that the position of remaining members of the traditional intelligentsia was undermined. It was no accident that the wave of Stalinist repression broke over them at the end of the thirties. By that time the ruling nomenklatura had a sufficient number of new specialists to replace those who were now ousted.