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The Intelligentsia and Communism
Would-be members of the Communist Party were granted a certain degree of leeway in their self-depictions. At times, even students from admittedly petit-bourgeois backgrounds were permitted to make themselves into good proletarians by showing they assumed the Communist worldview. This plasticity of identity, however, was not boundless. Self-improvement was ruled out in cases involving unsavory political behavior. If offspring of the nobility or the clergy could become "proletarians in spirit," workers who voted for the Mensheviks ballot or supported the Opposition were believed to be alien. What was at stake here was the malleability of the soul, its openness to the light. Politically, a student had to be a tabula rasa; if he had ever manifested a formed consciousness, it had to be a Communist one.
In this respect the position of the intelligentsia was peculiar. Seldom politically naive, the attitude of this class to the Communist mission tended to be described in highly charged terms. Before the Revolution, Lenin articulated the relation between the historically given Man and the ideal Man through the terms "working class" and "intelligentsia." The former was a virtuous and morally good but self-alienated humanity, men reduced to cogs in the great machine of capitalist production; the latter was the bearer of the genuine spirit in Man, the agency that strove to realize the capacities of the working class by setting the working class free. To attain consciousness and live up to its messianic potential, the working class had to absorb the spirituality of the intelligentsia, to appropriate the intelligentsia's mind, as it were.
The valence of the revolutionary intelligentsia was not stable, however. Historical events were prone to altering the discursive field within which it was given meaning. With the appearance of Russian Social Democracy, the term "Party" intruded upon the semantics of the revolutionary discourse in important ways, stripping "the intelligentsia" of its positive meaning as the bearer of proletarian class consciousness and leaving it only the negative meaning of a selfish intellectual caste. Now the intelligentsia was a questionable ally of the working class at best and a dangerous fifth column at worst. It was unclear which was more likely, a revolutionary class alliance between the intelligentsia and the proletariat, or a reactionary, but perhaps more natural, alliance between the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie. When not in the camp of the traitors, the "old intelligentsia" was perceived as "fellow travelers" (poputchiki), untrustworthy assistants to the working class, instrumental to the Communist agenda only if they renounced all claims to leadership. All that remained in the hands of the old "conscience of the Revolution" was an intellectual knowledge bereft of all messianic significance, a know-how which facilitated the eschatological journey the Party charted, but which posed no threat to the Party's spiritual leadership.[1] From a supra-class entity, esteemed by the Bolsheviks as the paragon of universalism before the Revolution, the intelligentsia was degraded into a particularist social group, one subclass among many others present in NEP's transitional society, another proletarian class ally alongside the "toiling peasantry." Only the advent of full Communism was to "pull the majority of the intelligentsia to the side of the proletariat."[2]
Theoretically, the intelligentsia could convert to the Bolshevik position and "dissolve into the proletariat" -- had not many prominent members of the Bolshevik leadership (Lenin, Trotsky and others) done just that? The "intelligentsia minority," its truly "conscientious part," had proved its loyalty to the working class by joining the Party before the Revolution, when dedication to the proletarian cause had been very dangerous. "When we deal with this segment of the intelligentsia," Party theoreticians stated, "we deal with people whose loyalty to Communism is beyond doubt."[3] But by the 1920s members of the intelligentsia who wished to join the Party were met with supreme suspicion.
Despite all that, however, the term "intelligentsia" retained a tinge of its former messianic sense even in those years. The sense of lingering gap between the working class and its ideal form during NEP led the Bolshevik regime to set about to create a new proletarian vanguard, a "new intelligentsia" coming from its own ranks, an intelligentsia that was unquestioningly loyal to the Party.[4] "Unable to do without an intelligentsia," Lunacharskii explained, "we have no choice but to create our own intelligentsia to replace the old."[5] If the Party held the old intelligentsia in contempt, it regarded the new intelligentsia as a healthy outgrowth of the Proletarian Dictatorship.
Immediately after the end of the Civil War, preparations were made for a comprehensive purge of the intelligentsia.[6] "Those who do not work with their hands, whose activity does not link them with the working class have no place in our ranks," stated the official press in 1921. "Comrades, bear in mind that it is this uncompromising interpretation of membership requirements that distinguishes us from the Mensheviks."[7] True, somebody like
Rafail dubbed the workers’ opposition propensity to see the origins of all our negatives in the intelligentsia that staffs the leading organs as “intelligentsia-cannibalism (intelligenstvoedstvo). If we turn the Party rudder in the correct direction,” Rafail assured, “we can easily digest all these tens of thousands of members of the intelligentsia who entered our Party.”[8] His voice infinitely more significant, Lenin, however, urged the Party "to discard the bureaucrats, the dishonest and the shaky and the Mensheviks who had dyed their facade in new colors but who remained just the same in the depth of their souls."[9] The head of the Central Purge Commission, Sol'ts, interpreted this as a demand that "the purge commissions pay special attention to the Party members from the intelligentsia."[10] Worker-purifiers (rabochii-chistil'shchiki) said about the intelligentsia that "it came to the Party by mistake; the Communist Party is not the intelligentsia's Party," and demanded that "the intelligentsia demonstrate it is not ballast."[11] Whereas the working class was sent to battle by decades of exploitation," Party spokesman explained, "the intelligentsia could well have joined the Revolution purely out of a "hope for promotion."[12]
Instructions to the local purge commissions reflected this sentiment: while the interrogation of workers had to be cut to a minimum, "the same yardstick could not be applied to the intelligentsia." The Party had to know "whether they had taken advantage of their bureaucratic position."[13] Party ideologues perceived the transitional period as a cultural war. For them the question was whether the old intelligentsia would discard its ancient robes transforming itself into “new men (novye liudi)” or whether it will “assimilate the psychology of our comrades to its own.”[14] Kalinin explained that before 1917 the Party knew how to remold the old intelligentsia in record time. “In joining the Party the thin layer of bourgeois offspring could not introduce bourgeois habits into the proletarian milieu. First, the bourgeois were too few. Second, underground activity, the life of the Party itself, moved them out of their native milieu and placed them with the proletariat. In two, three years bourgeois students acquired proletarian manners becoming proletarian to all intents and purposes.” Now, however, the Party could not be that certain of its transformative capacities. “While the share of offspring of the bourgeoisie who stream into our Party remained the same in relative terms, their absolute numbers are much higher. [. . .] Moving into the Communist Party they tend to preserve their status and life style. Highly qualified individuals who doubtlessly do have some Communist spirit by virtue of their general intellectual level, they shortly reach a high position in the Party. Hence the clash, evident everywhere, between the proletarian and petit-bourgeois Party newcomers, a clash that does not necessarily take a political form but that can also be expressed as a conflict between two norms of behavior typical of two different social groups.”[15] The purge commissions developed a “special approach” to the intelligentsia that clung to its old life habits, “particularly the intelligentsia that found itself in our Party in 1921, or 1920, or 1919, that is, after the October Revolution,” Shkiriatov reported to the XI Party Congress. “We not only double checked that such a person is not a careerist, that he is a conscientious human being who workers well in soviet institutions and has the necessary theoretical preparation, but that he also has an adequate Communist, revolutionary spirit.”[16]
A feuilleton entitled "The People's Judgment Day" threw the difference between the treatment of the intelligentsia and the working class during the purge into a sharp relief:
The chair of the meeting summons the first Communist -- a worker-peasant -- to the table. Two, three words and his autobiography is exhausted. Any derailments? None. "Next!" An anxious Party functionary, a former chancery worker steps in. "Your autobiography, comrade." A long and boring story unfolds. One can see right away that this Communist was never oppressed by capitalists, that this individuum hovers somewhere up in the sky. "Next!" A highly placed Communist wearing an intelligentsia face steps forward. Despite his higher education he had followed a wandering course without rudder or sail, had been with the Socialist Revolutionaries, with the Mensheviks, with the Bund. [. . .] As he tells his autobiography, this comrade seems like an actor. Gradually workers shake themselves up and expose the physiognomy of a bureaucrat.[17]
The message to the purge commissions was unequivocal -- subject intelligentsia autobiographies to merciless examination: "While mistakes committed by undeveloped proletarians may be forgiven, more should be expected from the knowledgeable."[18] It was intelligentsia types like Razdobreev the official press had in mind when it wrote at the time that "when workers come across a `specialist' their vigilance intensifies" and they ask one question after another.[19] When roles reversed, workers rebelled. Rudzutak recalled in 1920 how a “worker complained about the soviet prim ladies from the Party committees that interrogate me and demand I fully confessed my views (zastavliaet ispovedovat’sia).[20] In this scheme, workers belonged to the cultural type that regarded long interrogations an effeminizing experience.
The detailed minutes of the 1921 purge kept at the Smolensk Institute give a sense of what an intelligentsia identity meant to rank-and-file Communists and show that the baiting of intelligentsia took place at the grass roots. The purge committee did its work in the presence of all the members of the cell as well as a number of "extramural worker representatives representing the Smolensk proletariat." The meetings lasted for many hours, in one case from three in the afternoon to ten in the morning, as each member of the cell was called to the center stage to recount his autobiography aloud. Anyone present could comment on what he heard, advance derailments and ask questions, the Party's "plenipotentiaries" (upolnomochennye) -- Communists with underground experience and proletarian class origins delegated to the purge meetings by the county Party commissions -- making their own inquires.[21]
About every fourth student belonged to the intelligentsia cohort that, as one would expect, suffered the brunt of the purge. Consider Mochelevkin’s interrogation. Although this student claimed in his questionnaire that he was "of peasant origins," a brief interrogation showed otherwise.
Q: You said your father was a land tiller. But did not the tsarist government prohibit Jews from working the land? Besides, did you not omit the fact that your mother used to ran a shop?
A: My father had two desiatinas of land which he tilled himself. He also worked at his brother's as a steward. In my mother’s occupation I had little interest.[22]
When Mochelevkin confessed that "the February Revolution came to me as a surprise; in the beginning, I was unable to orient myself," somebody recalled that had been overheard to make such typically intelligentsia statements as, "The toppling of Kerensky was premature and unnecessary." Besides, "when Mochelevkin delivered a speech at a political rally, for some reason soldiers wanted to beat him up" -- a bizarre inclination on the part of a zealously pro-Bolshevik crowd, unless of course, "the speaker objected to our withdrawal from the war."
Undoubtedly the most intriguing remark on this case was made when one of Mochelevkin's detractors noted that the accused "liked to kiss ladies' hands." Such behavior, he explained, "is typical to the intelligentsia." Ever on the alert for the slightest physical clues, this Bolshevik physiognomist believed that Mochelevkin's general demeanor, his grimaces, the telltale floridness of his gestures all betrayed an absence of proletarian masculinity. Mochelevkin's effeminized portrait revealed the class-gender nexus integral to Bolshevism. Bolshevik poetics symbolically grafted the intelligentsia onto the traditional and deprecated role of the female, assigning the active, masculine role to the proletariat. In this scheme, thinking itself became a feminine faculty whereas acting was strictly masculine. "Its feminine psyche," Trotsky believed, "the fact it is trained to be contemplative, impressionable and sensitive, undercuts the intelligentsia's physical power."[23] "Obsequious" and "weak," the caste of intellectuals was persistently described by the Bolsheviks as malicious but effective thanks to its ability to coax the strong but naive workers into turning their bodily strength against itself, which kept them from open rebellion.
Another detractor brought Mochelevkin's intelligentsia identity into particularly sharp focus when he called attention to the defendant's smoothness: "Mochelevkin is eloquent about things that the committee is not interested in, dodging what is really significant." As the following exchange suggests, not only had he shunned physical labor, but he had also lied in denying that others had done household chores for him:
Q: Your autobiography states that your means were strained. But have you not had servants?
A: No, my mother was the one who had servants, not I.
Bereft of will and rotten to the core, Mochelevkin was purged by an overwhelming majority.
Doubtless, the apogee of the purge was the interrogation of the institute's rector, Vasilii Ivanovich Razdobreev, a quintessential intelligentsia Communist.[24] Razdobreev had completed his formal education before the Revolution. During the last stages of the Civil War he had served as the military commissar of the Smolensk Institute, a post he occupied still in 1921. Considering his social physiognomy, his successful career before the Revolution, his late admission to the Party (April 1920) as well as the fact that he had been "corrupted by long interaction with petit-bourgeois milieu," Razdobreev’s position was precarious.