The Russian Revolution полностью

The word “intelligentsia” entered the English vocabulary in the 1920s from the Russian. The Russians, in turn, adopted it from France and Germany, where “intelligence” and “Intelligenz” had gained currency in the 1830s and 1840s to designate educated and “progressive” citizens.* It soon went out of fashion in the West, but in Russia it acquired great popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century to describe not so much the educated elite as those who spoke and acted on behalf of the country’s silent majority—a counterpart of the patrimonial establishment (bureaucracy, police, the military, the gentry, and the clergy). In a country in which “society” was given no political outlets, the emergence of such a group was inevitable. The term was never precisely defined, and pre-revolutionary literature is filled with disputes over what it meant and to whom it applied. Although in fact most of those regarded as intelligenty had a superior education, education in itself was not a criterion: thus, a businessman or a bureaucrat with a university degree did not qualify as a member of the intelligentsia, the former because he worked for his own profit, the latter because he worked for the profit of the Tsar. Only those qualified who committed themselves to the public good, even if they were semi-literate workers or peasants. In practice, this meant men of letters—journalists, academics, writers—and professional revolutionaries. To belong, one also had to subscribe to certain philosophical assumptions about man and society derived from the doctrines of materialism, utilitarianism, and positivism. The popularity of the word derived from the fact that it made it possible to distinguish social “activists” from passive “intellectuals.” However, we shall use the two terms interchangeably since in Western languages the distinction has not been established.

As a self-appointed spokesman for all those not members of the establishment—that is, more than nine-tenths of the population—the Russian intelligentsia saw itself and was seen by its rivals as the principal threat to the status quo. The battle lines in the last decades of Imperial Russia were drawn between official Russia and the intelligentsia, and it was eminently clear that the victory of the latter would result in the destruction of the former. The conflict grew so bitter that anyone advocating conciliation and compromise was liable to find himself caught in a deadly cross fire. While the establishment counted mainly on its repressive apparatus to keep the intelligentsia at bay, the latter used, as a lever, popular discontent, which it aggravated with all the means at its disposal, mostly by persistent discrediting of tsarism and its supporters.

Although circumstances caused the intelligentsia to be especially important in Russia, it was, of course, not unique to that country. Tönnies, in his seminal distinction between “communities” and “societies,” allowed that in addition to communities linked by territorial proximity and ties of blood there existed “communities of mind” whose bond was ideas.³ Pareto identified a “non-governing elite” which closely resembles the Russian intelligentsia.⁴ Because these groups are international, it is necessary at this point to engage in a digression from Russian history: neither the emergence of the Russian intelligentsia nor the impact of the Russian Revolution on the rest of the world can be properly appreciated without an understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of modern radicalism.