Russia under the Old regime

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'Strange story', written in 1869, there occurs an early example of such usage when the hero on a visit to a provincial town is invited to a reception at which, he is told, there will be present the town's doctor and teacher and 'the entire intelligentsia'. This broad definition gradually went out of use but it was revived after 1917 by the communist regime. Averse to the concept of an intelligentsia as a distinct social category, as it cannot be fitted into the Marxian class scheme, and yet unable to purge it from Russian speech, it employs 'intelligentsia' as an occupational category to describe what in the west would be called the white collar class. By this definition, the Chief of the KGB and Solzhenitsyn are both members of the 'Soviet intelligentsia'.

The narrow usage has a more complicated story. Very much as has been the case with the designation 'liberal' in English, 'intelligentsia' in time lost its descriptive and objective quality, and acquired a normative, subjective one. In the 1870s, young people holding radical philosophical, political and social opinions began to insist that they and they alone had the right to the title intelligentsia. The point was not immediately conceded by those whom such an exclusive definition would put outside the pale of progressive company. But by the 1890s it was no longer enough for a Russian to have an education and play a part in public life in order to qualify; one had to stand in staunch opposition to the entire political and economic system of the old regime, and be willing actively to participate in the struggle for its overthrow. In other words, to be an intelligent meant as much as to be a revolutionary.

The result of the concurrent expression of two quite different ideas through the medium of the same word was confusion. In 1909 a group of liberal intellectuals, several of them ex-radicals, published a volume of essays called Vekhi {Signposts) in which they took to task the Russian intelligentsia for what they considered lack of political sense, irreligiosity, low morals, superficial education and all other manner of sin. There was no doubt among the readers who was meant. Yet the authors of the symposium were certainly themselves members of the intelligentsia in the eyes of the government and its supporters.

Confronted with this situation, the historian must make up his own mind. It would certainly be wrong to adopt the exclusive definition of the intelligentsia insisted upon by its radical wing. The struggle against the autocracy was joined by many people acting on liberal or even conservative principles who would have nothing in common with the whole revolutionary ideology. To exclude them, would do violence to the historical record. The inclusive definition embracing the entire white-collar group is even less useful because it tells nothing of political and social attitudes which were the very thing separating those conscious of belonging to the intelligentsia from the rest of the nation. The definition which we shall adopt falls somewhere between the two described above. It employs as its touchstone the sense of commitment to public welfare: a member of the intelligentsia or an intelligent is someone not wholly preoccupied with his personal well-being but at least as much and preferably much more concerned with that of society at large, and willing, to the best of his ability, to work on society's behalf. Under the terms of this definition, one's level of education and class status are of secondary importance. Although a well-educated and affluent person naturally is in a better position to understand what is wrong with his country and to act accordingly, it does not follow that he cares to do so. At the same time, a simple, semi-literate working man who makes an effort to grasp how his society functions and to work on its behalf does qualify as an intelligent; it is in this sense that in late nineteenth-century Russia one spoke of a 'working-class intelligentsia' and even of a 'peasant intelligentsia'.3

An intelligentsia thus defined emerges wherever there exists a significant discrepancy between those who control political and economic power, and those who represent (or believe themselves to represent) public opinion. It is strongest and most vocal in countries where an authoritarian government confronts an educated elite receptive to new ideas; here, capacity to act and desire to act engage in bitter conflict, and the intelligentsia solidifies into a state within a state. In traditional despotisms, where there is no significant educated public, and in properly functioning democracies, where ideas can be readily translated into policies, the intelligentsia is not likely to emerge.*

In imperial Russia the emergence sooner or later of an intelligentsia was a foregone conclusion; and given the unyielding patrimonial outlook of the monarchy where political power was concerned, it was equally certain that the struggle between the intelligentsia and the regime would become a war to the bitter end. There must have always been disaffected people in Russia, but the earliest political dissident about whom there is documentary evidence is one Prince I.A.Khvorostinin. This aristocrat of the early seventeenth century was denounced to the authorities for failure to practise Orthodoxy, keeping Latin books in his library, calling the tsar a 'despot', and complaining that among the 'stupid' populace of Moscow he found no one to converse with. He requested permission to leave for Lithuania, but this was denied to him and he ended up being exiled to a monastery

* Unless, of course, some part of the educated minority decides that it knows best what is good for the people. It can then disregard the popular vote on grounds that (i) it gives the people no 'real* choice, or (2) that the electoral process is manipulated, or, when all else fails, (3) that the masses have been brainwashed and vote against their own better interest.