What is the Russian Intelligentsia?
The Russian intelligentsia is a specific formation of
nineteenth-century Russia, not to be identified with the "educated and professional classes" of the Western lands, or with the officials, technicians, and managers of present-day Russia. It was extruded out of a fixed society of medieval estates into which it nolonger fitted, an ideological sign that that old world of status had been outgrown. It was recruited simultaneously from the more generous sons and daughters of the nobility, and from the plebian youth: from above and from below. Its members were held together, neither by a common social origin and status, nor by a common role in the social process of production. The cement which bound them together was a common alienation from existing society, and a common belief in the sovereign efficacy of ideas as shapers of life. They lived precariously suspended as in a void, between an uncomprehending autocratic monarchy above and a uncomprehending, unenlightened mass below. Their mission as independent thinkers was to be critics of the world in which they as yet had no place and prophets of a world that had not yet come into being, and might have had no place for them, either. They were lawyers without practice, teachers without schools, graduate clerics without benefices and often without religion, chemists without laboratories, technicians, engineers, statisticians for whom industry has as yet no need, journalists without a public... politicians without parties, sociologists and statesmen rejected by the state and ignored by the people. They anticipated and oversupplied in advance the requirements of a world that was too slow in coming into being, and sought to serve a folk that had no use for their services. In the decaying feudal order they found
neither scope nor promise; in the gross, timid, and backward mercantile bourgeoisie neither economic support nor inspiration; in the slumbering people no echo to their ardent cries.
Even while they sought to serve the unreceptive present, at heart they longed for its coming, and all possible and impossible futures for Russia mingled together in their dreams.
Onward to the Next!
Quote from Three Who Made a Revolution, by Bertram D. Wolfe.
Copyright 1983, Stein and Day Publications.
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