The Thinking Reed

The growth of the new intelligentsia during the 1940s, in both quantity and quality, was bound to worry Stalin. In the 1930s members of the old intelligentsia and the revolutionary intelligentsia had suffered from his repressive measures, but those same years saw the formation of the nucleus of a new intellectual stratum. A considerable proportion of these people belonged to national minorities, especially the Jews, to whom exodus from the Pale of Settlement had given access to the intellectual professions, which from the nineteenth century onwards enjoyed particular prestige in that community. The thirties were not only the period when the old intelligentsia was crushed, but also the period of the formation on a mass scale of a new intelligentsia which was partly Jewish. During the twenties a certain cultural potential had accumulated in Jewish families and they had turned 100 per cent towards Russian culture. The Jews who joined the intelligentsia in the 1930s took up the banner of the Russian Westernizers of the nineteenth century. Had the Jews remained within the ambience of their own ‘national culture’ and not become assimilated, they would have given the rulers no great cause for alarm. However, instead, they reinforced to a certain degree the most progressive wing of the Russian intelligentsia and Russian culture.

It is therefore not surprising that the campaign launched by Stalin against the new intelligentsia was at the same time an anti-Semitic campaign. I. Kon wrote later that for the anti-Semite ‘the Jew symbolizes the intellectual in general.’1

The hatred of ‘Yids, students and intellectuals’ which was a traditional characteristic of the Russian bureaucracy was revived, so to speak, at a new level. ‘Stalin’, observes Roy Medvedev,

showed clear signs of anti-Semitism even before the war, when many centres of Jewish culture were eliminated and a great number of Jewish organizations suppressed. Hitler watched his harassment of Jews with considerable satisfaction. After the war, persecution and repressive measures against Jews were resumed with mounting intensity and brutality, until Stalin came up with his plan for a ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question, which envisaged the deportation of all Soviet Jews to the northern regions of Kazakhstan.2

Nevertheless, the struggle against the new intelligentsia which began at the end of the forties cannot be reduced to anti-Semitism alone. In Russia anti-Semitism was always clearly linked with anti-intellectualism.

The period 1945 to 1946 was a time of great expectations. After the victory in the Second World War people hoped in a vague way for some changes such as those which did actually come about in 1953-54. ‘Immediately after the Second World War,’ writes Graham,

many intellectuals in the Soviet Union hoped for a relaxation of the system of controls that had been developed during the strenuous industrialization and military mobilizations. Instead, there followed the darkest period of state interference in artistic and scientific realms. This postwar tightening of ideological controls spread rather quickly from the fields of literature and art to philosophy, then finally to science itself. Causal factors already mentioned include the prewar suspicion of bourgeois science, the extremely centralized Soviet political system, and the personal role of Stalin. But there was another condition that exacerbated the ideological tension: the Cold War between the Soviet Union and certain Western nations, particularly the United States.3