A small requiem to intelligentsia

Recently I took part in a small seminar, which was organised by the Public Chamber of Russian Federation and was dedicated to the problem of intelligentsia. Does it still exist in Russia, and if so, what role does it have? This question has interested me for some time now, and here I would like to provide my point of view (which, as it turned out, seems to be significantly different from some of the others).

The Latin word “intelligentsia” was devised in Russia in the end the 19th Century in order to describe a very strange group of people, which exists only in Russia. Russian intelligentsia. An example of selfless service to the fatherland. Readiness to make whatever sacrifices necessary for the people. A high and certainly deserved value, if we recall such names as Belinskiy, Herzen, Chernishevsky.

Often (under the influence of Marxism) people refer to the educated part of the society as intelligentsia. But it wasn't education that defined Russian intelligentsia. It was its active civic stand and its constant opposition to authority. Defined by the fact that it defended those values, which the state didn't. Apart from anti-state behaviour, intelligentsia was also characterised by its anti-religiousness. I.e. it actively fought with the autocracy and the orthodoxy in the name of the people.

Accordingly, that part of educated Russia, which thought it possible to collaborate with bureaucrats or was itself on civil service (as were, for example, V.I.Dal or I.A.Goncharov), or independent thinkers who didn't share mainstream intelligent opinions, remained outside of intelligentsia and underwent attacks. In such a situation were, for example, N.V.Gogol after the publication of "Chosen Places", F.M.Dostoevsky, N.S.Leskov, A.K.Tolstoy and many others.

The determining feature of intelligentsia in the 19th century was that it clearly divided "ours" from "non-ours", itself from everyone else. But "everyone else" just happened to be the biggest and the most original Russian thinkers.

Naturally, in the period of hegemony of the proletariat, the party officials considered all educated people as intelligentsia and transferred onto them their attitudes of intelligentsia of the 19th century. They always expected an open or secret disagreement with authorities and preventively punished it.

Intelligentsia, as in the sense of the 19th century, showed itself twice in soviet times - in the time of Khrushchev “Thaw” in the second half of the fifties and in the beginning of Perestroika.

However in the process of Perestroika, when super-liberal reforms took place, intelligentsia, as a group, disappeared. It melted. It succumbed.

We have intelligent people, but have no intelligentsia.

We have educated people (although, increasingly more half-educated, poorly educated, badly educated and those who managed to grab some information somewhere but don't really know how or where to apply it), but there is no intelligentsia.

Instead we have "American Idol" and "Big Brother".

What is the connection? There are many reasons: part of intelligentsia moved into power and out of "sufferers for the people" became "lucky-ones for the people". Part immigrated to various countries, where intelligentsia never existed, and tried as much as possible to fit into the foreign life. Part got busy making money, and in this fuss lost the necessary incandescence. Part simply got tired...

Intelligentsia left together with the habit of reading books, in order to think about life, and not to kill time of this precious life. But the natural and necessary opposition of authority is now searching for other social forms.

A Russian version of this article can be found here.