The Peril of Thinking for Others: The Russian Intelligentsia, Pro and Contra

Sibelan Forrester and Olga Partan, eds. The Russian Intelligentsia. Myth, Mission, and Metamorphosis. Myths and Taboos in Slavic Cultures. Boston: Academic Studies Press. 2025. 398 pp. $129.00. The Russian intelligentsia, it turns out, resembles Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the novel. A protean and self-reflecting category, it can swallow its own parodies without ceasing to be itself, and it includes (as Svetlana Evdokimova observes of Anton Chekhov) even those who witheringly condemn it. This splendid collection of essays will help us revise our too often stereotyped idea of the intelligent, whether demonized or revered, weaponized or worn as a badge of honor. The intelligentsia exists, and Russians across a vast, varied social and ideological spectrum have self-identified as part of it. The persuasiveness of this volume lies in its refusal to generalize. It feeds into no ideology. The category shifts and is historically shaped, and users of the term define its core attributes and charisma in their own way. The book’s entries are arranged neutrally, in chronological order, opening with the reign of Catherine the Great (Marcus Levitt on Nikolai Novikov and Alexander Radishchev). Its somber endpoint is an essay by Tatiana Smorodinska on Vladimir Putin’s regime: an energetic intelligentsia at first tolerated and then, after 2022, sustaining itself either abroad or precariously online. For all its forward movement from epoch to epoch, the volume cannot be read as a history of the intelligentsia under a single organizing rubric. Most of the entries are case studies built from the bottom up. Originating in forums held between 2017 and 2021, its eighteen chapters are authored by established senior scholars writing out of their own specialty. To be sure, some arguments and tactics are more palatable than others. The book, however, is not about us or our judgments. It takes seriously the toolkit of ideas and options immediately available to the persons involved—that is, debates within the intelligentsia (and against it) in their own time. It also takes for granted that all of us, to some extent, are a product of the institutions we come to oppose. The task of defining the intelligentsia runs like a troubled red thread throughout the volume. Alyssa DeBlasio, later in the book, devotes an entire chapter to the problem. With her seasoned philosopher’s eye, she tracks the difference between intelligentsia, public intellectual, and university academic striving to professionalize. The intelligentsia never lent itself to statistical or sociological classification, she argues. It was more a myth and a mode. These myths and modes were often unspoken and in retrospect easy to misread; times change, but an honorific label can stick and later become slander. Marina Adamovich, editor of the venerable émigré periodical Novyi zhurnal (founded 1942 in New York City), attempts an inventory. For some, the intelligentsia includes all people engaged in “intellectual work”; for others, only the alienated, or only those who boycott the government, or those who resist the bourgeoisie, or those who wish to serve (and sacrifice for) the common people, or all those who insist on the right to independent thought. However, Adamovich notes a common denominator among all users: a “zest for power and spiritual leadership” (p. 250). Certainly some degree of zest would be natural among educated, public-spirited people disempowered by Russia’s archaic imperial system—even if only an ardent desire to make a difference. The problem comes in using that power once you get it. Here the intelligentsia, however broadly defined, had little experience. When the imperial system ended in 1917, suddenly all bets were off. Likewise with the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Sofya Khagi discusses the furious post-Soviet debates over the “people of the sixties,” exemplary members of an intelligentsia that naïvely continued to see itself as an enlightened ethical elite. All they had were untried ideals and anti-Stalinism. Neither provided traction for a positive program. A pivotal entry in the usage wars, therefore, is Olga Sobolev’s chapter on Landmarks (Vekhi). The narrowing of the concept “intelligentsia” to apply primarily to political radicals (materialists and nihilists) began with Vekhi in 1909—and from there, thanks largely to Isaiah Berlin and Richard Pipes, spread to Western scholarship. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sinyavsky fed into this current. It was Pipes who accused the intelligentsia of endorsing the dangerously maximalist idea that it is “the task of politics to make man virtuous.” But such militant reforging was an article of faith for one faction only. In its own time, Sobolev reminds us, Landmarks authors called for a personalist “church intelligentsia” to counter the “inner slavery” of positivism and utilitarian ethics. The church intelligentsia is the focus of Irene Masing-Delic’s deep account of Silver Age polemics over first principles—in this case, the competing claims of dialectically evolving eternal Matter (the Marxist-positivist stance) and the agency of a Divine Creator as professed by religious Idealists. What divides these two wings of the intelligentsia is easy to see. Less well known is what Masing-Delic documents: how earnestly many religious thinkers strove to win over the old materialist intelligentsia to a more flexible worldview, emphasizing how much—outside their disagreement over the existence of God—the two groups held in common. Both had a fondness for prophecy, a thirst for utopia, faith in Russia as universal vanguard, and a revulsion for the bourgeoisie. In our time, we might note, the worst of all worlds prevails under Putin: a reinvigorated Orthodox Church again subservient to the state, a weaponized Russian exceptionalism, and the alliance of aggressive nationalism with private greed. The chronological record has some gaps. No single essay is dedicated to the Romantic period, for example, with its proliferation of salon and kruzhok cultures on either side of the Decembrist watershed. Is the intelligentsia unique to Russia? Only Evdokimova provides a detailed parallel from another culture: the French debates over the role of public intellectuals in political life in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. Although each entry is designed to stand alone, we are left with a strong sense of the whole, since dilemmas repeat and reecho throughout the volume. The remainder of this review essay discusses two recurrent themes. First are the options available to the self-aware, disaffected Russian subject. Levitt suggests a two-stage paradigm for Enlightened social consciousness under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) that reverberates throughout subsequent chapters. An initial prepoliticized phase emphasizes individual moral improvement, often with a pious component and always entailing new journals; this is the Novikov model. It is followed by the Radishchev template, a summons to participate in a public sphere more radical, rational, impatient, and politically ambitious. These two options are on a collision course. The state needs educated servitors, but resists sharing power; the intelligentsia insists that knowledge is empowering. In the Russian context, however, what leverage do acts of knowing and creating have against political power? Empress Catherine put an abrupt end to both Novikov and Radishchev. This eighteenth-century scenario, with the collision delayed but not avoided, is meticulously recalled (and updated) by Carol Any in her essay, “Remaking the Literary Intelligentsia,” on the Stalinist 1930s through the 1940s. The proletarian radicals won in the 1920s, but a decade later the elimination of the bad—deporting philosophers and censoring ideas—was no longer enough. The Party, as a modernizing force, had to engineer the good. Here Any discusses four strategies available to an authoritarian government for molding the writers it needs: recruit, educate, unionize, and purge. All four aim to co-opt. Courting a celebrity like Maksim Gorky back from fascist Italy in 1929 was a crucial step in the first three strategies. But the purges came all the same. Any’s elegant account of Soviet success at creating a “state-friendly intelligentsia” is complemented later in the Thaw era by Sibelan Forrester, who traces in fascinating detail the symbiotic relation between science hard and soft, that realm of “infotainment” linking the USSR’s technological intelligentsia with the science fiction writer of utopias as well as more risk-laden dystopias. Both Any and Forrester describe twentieth-century cases where Power (vlast') and the creative intelligentsia not only share resources but actively court and reshape one another. Both are balanced, albeit in a bittersweet way, by the volume’s final entry, Smorodinska on Russian film and media during the first two decades of Putin. In those largely uncensored years, any reverent memory toward the earlier self-sacrificing intelligentsia was considered fake, unrealistic. Films depicted schoolteachers and other earnest carriers of culture as deluded fools, narcissists, and impotents—only doctors were exempt. The sweet part of the story starts a half-decade before the invasion of Ukraine, with the boom in videoblogging, crowdfunding, web doc series, and progressive nongovernmental organizations. A plethora of online courses, educational and charitable websites, and smartphone apps for interactive history games began to challenge the state’s propaganda narratives. The round of mass protests in 2020 and 2021, linked to the initial attempt on Aleksei Navalny’s life and the hundred million views of his YouTube documentary Dvorets dlia Putina (A Palace for Putin), seemed to presage the rebirth of a new, Radishchev-style intelligentsia: activist, humanistic, idealistic, but now techno-savvy. Of course the bitter wins out; the purges come all the same. In 2017, a “Going to the People” outreach project had been launched to teach children in remote villages how to code and design websites. After the invasion, the project was paused—and in 2023, closed. An independent public sphere, its organizers declared, now “put its participants at risk.” A second theme running through these chapters is broader and perhaps happier: the intelligentsia and culture. Radical nihilists (and Futurist rhetoric) were famous for wanting to destroy cultural legacies wholesale, but they were a small—albeit colorful and noisy—minority. Most of the culture wars were negotiated affairs, scrupulously nuanced in this volume. These wars too have their exemplary patrons, battle plans and truces, although the grid is more complex than the Novikov-Radishchev binary. In a footnote to her Chekhov essay, Evdokimova remarks that the very word kul'tura came late to Russian public discourse, not until the 1830s, when it was first associated with the virtues of agriculture (“cultivation”) rather than with education or aesthetics. By the Realist period, however, culture had settled on the written and performed word. Part Two of the volume, “The Nineteenth Century,” opens on three strong chapters that discuss the stance toward the intelligentsia on the part of Fyodor Dostoevsky (by Alexander Burry), Lev Tolstoy (by Michael Denner), and Chekhov (by Evdokimova). Burry opts for a life-chronology. He argues that Dostoevsky, throughout his tempestuous career, held fast to three principled commitments—to Christ, to the Russian peasantry, and to social reconciliation through nonviolent reform. His Pan-Slav chauvinism, Burry suggests, was more an ecstatic collective vision, a naïve upgrade of an adolescent utopian Christian socialism than it was a policy for aggressive implementation by the state. Dostoevsky’s enemy everywhere was the individual psyche gone astray, the radical nihilist and terrorist. These principles would seem to bring him close to Tolstoy—but Denner, magisterially, claims a more ambitious agenda for Russia’s great naysayer. Tolstoy despised the revolutionary nihilists, but he also disapproved of their Vekhi critics, who were, to a man, insufficiently anarchistic. All intelligenty—whether conservative, religious, liberal, or bomb-throwing—believed that political power could make bad things good, and thus (Tolstoy insisted) they were deluded into entering the “circle of coercion” (krug nasiliia). In shedding all faith in hierarchical governance, Tolstoy resembles Eastern mystics and prefigures Michel Foucault. The final writer in the triad, Chekhov, is a breath of fresh air. How would he have responded to Vekhi, Evdokimova asks, had he survived another five years? Her lengthy, luminous discussion places him outside familiar political binaries. Like Tolstoy, Chekhov was wary of the intelligentsia’s appetite for power with so little practice wielding it. His satire is unsparing. For Chekhov insisted that the true intelligentsia was not just friendly to culture but identical to it—in the person of the rural doctor, the devoted teacher, the responsible public intellectual who had outgrown the cult of uncouth behavior. Chekhov’s nonideological code of politeness and personal decency prompted Mikhail Lotman to call him “the most typical intelligent of all Russian writers” (p. 82). For Chekhov, everyday behavior was a species of disciplined performance that had ethical force, on and off the stage. Theater is prominent in this volume. Maria Ignatieva provides the riveting backstory of the Moscow Art Theatre’s debt, financially and artistically, to the cultured merchant class. On the cusp of the twentieth century, Russia’s urban, enlightened, philanthropic kupechestvo was an anomaly. As Old Believers, these merchants were cultural conservatives; as entrepreneurs and successful factory-owners, they were experienced modernizers. Stanislavsky’s theater could not have survived without their patronage, and with patronage came the expectation of influence and power. While novelists and poets, however unwillingly, might write works for the drawer or for trusted friends to memorize, the performing arts require a stage, real estate, a corporation, and a sympathetic commercial intelligentsia. The Moscow Art Theatre also figures prominently in Olga Partan’s account of the Russian Knights Templar, a mystical-anarchistic order founded in 1919 that claimed continuity with the monastic order chartered in Jerusalem in 1118. Among its sympathizers were the poet Marina Tsvetaeva and Evgeny Vakhtangov, Stanislavsky’s director of the First Studio. These Soviet-era Templars were not anarchist in the style of Mikhail Bakunin, nor mystical as in the séances of the Silver Age salon. They were, it appears, serious Gnostic Christians of a Masonic type, and thus overall followed the Novikov model of inner self-improvement. Their founder, Apollon Karelin (1863–1926), was a more scandalous figure than Partan lets on, however. An exile in Paris after 1905, his anarchist brotherhood in the French capital was infiltrated by the tsarist Okhrana; once repatriated, Karelin urged cooperation with the Bolsheviks and sat on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These Russian Templars had a great deal to hide. As a “Soviet spiritual underground,” they were so secret that Partan did not learn until recently that her own grandfather, Vakhtangov’s student Ruben Simonov, had been a knight. Theaters were one seismic public forum; journalism was another. Konstantine Kliouchkine surveys its radical face in the progressive press of the 1860s and 1870s, when the “classical [i.e. mixed-class] intelligentsia” embarked on a collision course with that other camp of writers alienated from the government, the gentry writers Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Nikolai Leskov (pp. 25–39). 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