What is intelligentsia to be blamed for?
Tracking down those responsible for one’s private and public woes and then executing them morally or physically is typical of the average person of any ethnicity, because punishing those guilty of asocial behavior is one of the basic principles of maintaining order in any viable society. The more problems a society has, the more intensive the search for the guilty is.
The latest and the most noticeable event of this kind was the speech of the Moscow Patriarch during his summer visit to Ukraine, in which he blamed all the revolutionary and post-revolutionary woes in the former Russian Empire on the intelligentsia. The Patriarch’s accusation was preceded by a massive campaign in the Russian mass media. And, although this viewpoint failed to find any significant support in Ukraine, the question is too serious to be just waved off. As this is an old and difficult problem, we should at least try to give an unbiased answer to the question “what is the intelligentsia guilty of?”.
First of all, it is impossible to clearly describe a circle of people who can be defined as “intelligentsia” because there are intermediary situations. As is known, any classification is arbitrary. The intelligentsia is closely tied, on the one hand, to highly-educated officials and entrepreneurs and, on the other, to the most advanced – professionally and culturally – workers and peasants who are recruited to its ranks.
The intelligentsia is very diverse. It may include a well-known artist with a vast fortune and a primary school teacher who barely makes both ends meet. In spite of some common features, the lifestyle and mentality of a singer, an actor, a surgeon, a nuclear scientist, or a polar explorer differ considerably, although all these people represent what is known as intelligentsia. Therefore, it would be wrong to liken the intelligentsia to an innumerable shoal of the same small fish which will make, as if by a command, a U-turn and swim in the right direction when they see danger.
There were representatives of the Russian intelligentsia among those who defended the idea of autocracy until their last breath, in spite of the obvious anachronism of this institution, in both the White and the Red armies, as well as in other more or less significant social movements in Russian history. Yet there were many intellectuals in the White movement. Most of the lieutenants and captains, the White Army’s backbone, were intellectuals who had either been called up during World War I or done officers’ crash courses at the beginning of the Civil War.
The vast majority of them were either killed in the Civil War or WWI, were repressed by the Bolsheviks, or went through many trials abroad. The Constitutional Democrats or, say, Right Socialist Revolutionaries were basically not less, if not much more, “intellectual” than the Bolsheviks with whom only a small part of the intelligentsia sided in the pre-revolutionary period. The Bolsheviks maligned and humiliated “the rotten intelligentsia” all the time, although they sometimes threw crumbs from their table to the intellectuals who they thought were of use to the regime.
Therefore, the accusations of all the woes that befell Russia and Ukraine in the 20th century, which Patriarch Kirill and his followers hurled against the intelligentsia, are totally unfounded. The accusing finger should be pointed, first of all, at the conservative (seemingly glossy, but in fact ignorant) ruling class of tsarist Russia and, not in the least, the totally rotten church, which had turned into a corrupt bureaucratic institution run by a tsar-appointed Ober-Procurator. An intellectual priest in tsarist Russia was as much a rarity as, for example, an intellectual merchant.
The intelligentsia performs extremely important social functions. It studies the macro- and micro-world, generates new ideas, shares know-ledge and cultural achievements with the rest of society, educates, treats, and even entertains its compatriots. So Kirill and other revilers of the intelligentsia should not lay the blame at somebody else’s door.
Yet there is no denying the fact that in the pre-revolutionary period representatives of the intelligentsia formed a considerable, and the most important part, of the Bolshevik and other radical parties. Although these parties were not very numerous when they seized power in October 1917, they played a tragic role in the history of many peoples, so it seems quite advisable to study this phenomenon.
The intelligentsia is well educated, usually sensitive, even sentimental. It reacts emotionally to external events. If a system has existed for a long time, the intelligentsia’s upper stratum is, as a rule, closely tied with this system and interested in its viability (naturally, if the system does not display extreme cruelty, first of all, towards this stratum of the intelligentsia). The medium-level intelligentsia has an opposite position: on the one hand, it has things to lose should the situation change, but, on the other hand, if the system or the regime changes, it may try to go further up the social ladder. The intelligentsia’s stratum which is close to the lower social classes is mostly disposed towards radical changes. These people have acquired a great deal of knowledge, but they are deprived of many benefits and can see the acute poverty of others almost every day. The low-level intelligentsia has negligible prospects. For this reason, the lower stratum of the intelligentsia is the most rebellious one.
However, intellectuals have many fellow travelers in a revolution. Revolutionary changes appeal to representatives of various social classes, who are sure of their capabilities but know that in the existing situation (due to the reigning class-divided system, class- or economy-related limitations, or due to rampant corruption) they have no opportunities to realize their potential or to raise their social status.
And, finally, people may become radical by force of their own character — they are romantics, thrill seekers, innate aggressors, or, on the contrary, those with a keen feeling of pity or justice. They may all come from very diverse social strata and classes. For example, Friedrich Engels was a successful entrepreneur. In tsarist Russia, revolutionaries also included intellectuals who represented oppressed ethnic minorities and saw that the only way to improve their people’s lot was to overthrow autocracy and bring the empire down.
The Bolshevik party’s core consisted of the so-called professional revolutionaries. Those members of society, whose outlooks differed from the official ideology and who could not carve out a professional career due to repressions, would go underground and make a job out of the re-volution. Having passed through the crucible of clandestine work, those professional revolutionaries were accustomed to secrecy and iron discipline, and often ceased to be susceptible to common human feelings. In their view, pity meant weakness and failure to achieve success. The Russian government of that time is to blame for bringing up, much to its regret, Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and their professional followers.
The events of the Russian revolution and Civil War showed how powerful even a relatively small organization of professional revolutionaries may be if it is headed by talented and merciless leaders.
Incidentally, Bolshevism (Marxism-Leninism) itself was born in the minds of those intellectuals who were far from material production and public administration. In all probability, if Vladimir Ulyanov had been a good engineer, he would hardly have become the Lenin we all know. Radical intellectuals were very well aware of social problems and empathized with the troubles of the lower classes, but they also saw that the government did not and was not going to tackle these problems.
But, unable to offer a workable solution, they began to advance the nice theories of a revolutionary transformation of industry and the entire society based on the impracticable fantasies of laymen. It seemed to them that if they passed good and fair laws that establish equality and execute or imprison a few hundred dissenters, all the rest would begin to live an affluent life and love each other. Sincerely trying to make humankind happy, the Bolsheviks very soon turned into a criminal organization that brought immeasurable woes to many nations.
Incidentally, many citizens of present-day Ukraine, including a part of the intelligentsia, are also suffering from a variety of Bolshevik voluntarism. This particularly applies to those who have absorbed, from schools or university classrooms, “the Bolshevik art of winning,” which means winning by crude coercion. Yet many of them are unaware of their mental affinity for the Bolsheviks: they believe that all they have to do is grab power, quickly adopt the “right” laws, and issue the “right” decrees.
This writer has had to run (or take part in the running of) all kinds of organizations — from a university faculty’s “neighborhood watch group” to the Protest Church that covers the territory of Russia, Ukraine, and a few other countries. Years of experience have taught me that human resources management is the most complicated variety of human activity as it requires knowledge, skills, and talent. Good managers are worth their weight in gold. Social management cannot stand unwarranted haste, superficial simplicity, and candy-box beauty.
It seems to many, also intellectuals, that if, for example, a law is passed in favor of the Russian (or, on the contrary, Ukrainian) language, things will look up straightaway. If somebody still continues to “raise hell” even after this, they should be “taken care of.” And things will be OK. Alas, things will not be OK unless a wise compromise is found in the interests of the entire Ukrainian nation. The language problem, which undoubtedly exists in our society, can only be solved by a concerted and strenuous effort of good experts — sociologists, linguists, politicians, public figures, and even economists and entrepreneurs (because it takes a lot of mo-ney to effectively enforce language and culture laws). The same applies to other fields. The adoption of the Tax Code showed that it is essential to find reasonable compromises.
Like any other specialists, intellectuals are especially valuable to society when they are doing their jobs: the singer sings, the poet writes poems, etc. If tackling political and economic problems becomes a sort of a hobby for a large number of amateurs, this means that professionals in these spheres — political figures, businesspeople, experts, and academics — are not working properly. In general, professionalism is a weak spot in post-Soviet societies.
As for romantics, thrill seekers, innate aggressors, the compassionate, and eager truth-seekers, all those disposed to rebellions, mutinies, and revolutions, they can be of use for society if they put their energy to good (and legal) use. It is perhaps not accidental that Britain — the birthplace of political and social reforms, trade unions, mass sports, many charities, and human rights organizations — has managed to live for a long time without social upheavals, authoritarian coups, or revolutions.
Ukraine has quite a few problems associated with “intellectual” professions. A major societal problem is the annual “churning-out” of thousands of new liberal arts specialists, most of whom have no earthly chances to find a job that will match their specialty and level of education. An engineer in lieu of a manual worker is a phenomenon known as “overqualification” which has far more minuses than pluses. Still more dangerous is corrupting the would-be intellectuals in educational institutions by means of illegal admissions, bribed grades, and, thus, phony degrees. This leads to the mass production of bogus intellectuals who are unable to perform the functions of a nation’s intellect and conscience.
The system should help clever, educated and honest people take the places they deserve. If too many clever, educated, compassionate, and truth-seeking people are poised against the system, this may result in big problems, upheavals, and even deaths.
Nikolai Berdyaev, who witnessed a lot of revolutionary events, wrote in Self-Knowledge (chapter “The Russian Revolution and the Communist World”): “All are responsible for the revolution, but most of all the old regime’s reactionary forces.” We cannot but agree with the well-known philosopher.
Of course, God forbid we have any woes, but they will be inevitable if our society does not learn to find compromises in order to solve imminent problems. In that case our descendants should not be too cre-dulous if a certain patriarch begins to persuade them to put all blame on the intelligentsia.
