HISTORY: AILEEN KELLYreviews Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian IntelligentsiaBy Vladislav Zubok Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 453pp. $35
THE PRE-revolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia – the original model for the word itself – were sui generis in their sense of mission and their power to impose their version of the truth on an entire society. A tiny persecuted minority, they were the self-appointed vanguard of the nation in their fight against Tsarist tyranny and injustice.
Their influence helped shape the great humanist tradition of Russian literature – yet their ideological intransigence, based on the conviction that history was on their side, found its ultimate expression in the autocratic rigidity of Bolshevism.
These two faces of Russia’s intellectual tradition are the background of Vladislav Zubok’s account of its rediscovery by the cultural elite in the post-Stalin period. That process, he argues, played a momentous role in European history, supplying the moral impetus for the fight for reform that eventually brought down the Soviet state. No analysis of the collapse of Soviet communism is complete without reference to the role of reform-minded intellectuals in helping to topple it. In the West, familiar Russian names – Pasternak, Siniavsky and Daniel, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Brodsky, the men and women of the Human Rights movement – conjure up a picture of heroes and heroines willing to risk prison, exile or confinement in psychiatric hospitals in the battle to keep alive the reform process which had begun with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. But Zubok’s study of the intelligentsia after Stalin replaces it with a much more ambivalent narrative of resistance and collusion, courage and cowardice, profound moral insight and astonishing blindness, which would contribute to its own demise as a force in post-Soviet society.
This group had a deep moral and emotional investment in the system it was seeking to subvert. Vast numbers of their predecessors had helped build and sustain it by embracing with a quasi-religious fervour the Bolsheviks’ version of the march of history. They had justified the horrors of collectivisation and the mass killings of the Terror, including the murders of close relatives and friends, with the argument of historical necessity.
The official acknowledgement of Stalin’s crimes destroyed certainties fundamental both to the Soviet project and their own existence, and a desperate search began to replace these shattered values. In the Thaw following Khrushchev’s revelations they rediscovered the ideals of the non-Bolshevik pre-revolutionary Left and the spiritual vision of writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, who had been reduced to near-silence under Stalin. This process of rediscovery, helped by the development of samizdat, continued during Khrushchev’s zigzags between reform and repression and the creeping re-Stalinisation under Brezhnev. (Dr Zhivago was first read in Russia in samizdat.) Solzhenitsyn chronicled the horrors of the Gulag, while historians used archival sources to destroy Stalin’s image as a great war leader. In 1965, there came a new milestone in the intelligentsia’s battle for fundamental freedoms: the tactic pursued by the Human Rights movement to act as if Soviet laws and constitutional rights were not a fiction and to condemn their violation in protests followed closely by the Western press.
But Western commentators were mistaken in believing that Russian dissidents shared the values of liberal democracies. Not even Sakharov included property rights among the goals of freedom. As Zubok argues, despite the revelations of the Thaw, Russian writers, artists and intellectuals still kept faith with the Revolution’s ideals, retaining the old intelligentsia’s dislike of bourgeois comforts and contempt for the sham freedoms of liberal democracy. Their target was not the destruction of Soviet communism but its reform: they hoped for a “dream partnership” in which, assuming the moral leadership that they saw as their historical role, they would work with reformers within the Party for a humane socialism. This dream of a “third way” between Stalinism and Western capitalism, shared by reformist economists within the Party, was shattered only in August 1968, when Soviet tanks crushed the first attempt to create socialism with a human face.
ZUBOK CHARTS the subsequent decline of the intelligentsia when external detente combined with stifling domestic conservatism, and socialist idealism gave way to cynical conformism. The Human Rights movement kept up its brave protests against the persecution of individuals and minorities, but in increasing isolation. Briefly revived by Gorbachev’s glasnost, the intelligentsia’s hopes for a pivotal role in their country’s regeneration were finally laid to rest along with Russian communism.
Why did they persist for so long in believing, against all the evidence, that their demands for autonomy could be accommodated with official ideology? Zubok points to the clash betweeen their hunger for personal freedom and the “holy grail of collectivism”. But the persisting struggle between these contradictory urges needs an explanation not forthcoming in his book. Its eloquent and stimulating defence of Russia’s rich intellectual tradition makes no clear distinction between the ethos of the radical intelligentsia and the humanism of the pre-revolutionary cultural and artistic elite. From the middle of the 19th century the two had begun to pull in contrary directions. This process is vividly chronicled in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Children, whose anti-hero, Bazarov, rejects the autonomy of art, pouring scorn on all forms of spiritual and cultural activity that do not directly serve the revolutionary goal. Tolstoy, Chekhov and other great Russian writers combined a passionate defence of humane values with trenchant criticism of the narrow self-righteousness and dogmatic utopianism of what came to be known as the “sectarian” intelligentsia.
A product of the same artistic and cultural milieu, Pasternak embodied its values in the character of Dr Zhivago. The post-Stalinist intellectual elite may have been “Zhivago’s children” to the extent that they were drawn to his vision of artistic freedom and spiritual autonomy, but they were equally heirs of a radical intelligentsia which dismissed that vision as “bourgeois individualism”. In the early 1960s, the search for new certainties and a new collective identity drew many dissidents to a xenophobic and anti-Semitic brand of conservative nationalism which colluded with the Party in campaigning against the “cosmopolitanism” of the Human Rights movement and the prominence of Jewish intellectuals in it.
Solzhenitsyn’s identification with this movement epitomised a split in the dissidents’ ranks, which Zubok describes as a great moral tragedy.
Dissident intellectuals saw the chance offered them by Gorbachev to collaborate in his reforms as the fulfilment of their pretension to be the conscience of society. But as Zubok remarks, their story has no happy ending. The unintended result of the reforms was the demise of Soviet communism. With it went the intelligentsia and its hopes for a pivotal role in Russia’s rebirth. In a society where all enjoy the freedom to create and engage in civic activities, there is no place for any group claiming the status of social oracles. The intelligentsia’s sacrifices in achieving that freedom were great, but the darker side of its collective sense of mission should not be forgotten.
We would do well to remember Chekhov’s prescient comment of 1899: “I have no faith in our intelligentsia . . . even when it suffers and complains, for its oppressors emerge from its own midst. I have faith in individuals, . . . be they intellectuals or peasants, for they’re the ones who really matter”.
Aileen Kelly is reader in intellectual history and Russian culture at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of King's College. Her publications include Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance and Views from the Other Shore