‘Intelligentsia’: the vanished concept and its aftermath

Abstract

Yuri Levada and his team took a keen interest in the Russian intelligentsia. Their ongoing research was stimulated by the need to identify those forces that can initiate changes in the Soviet system and transform it into a more open and democratic society. In this context, the intelligentsia was reputed to be an elite group capable of articulating new moral and behavioral norms, disseminating them throughout society, and influencing the most receptive social strata. This outlook, consistent with the traditional view of the intelligentsia in Russia, comports with the well-known model of ‘transmitting ideas’ in social and cultural anthropology, as well as with the models of sociocultural change found in the works of Abraham Moles and Norbert Elias’ theory of the ‘civilizing process.’ Empirical sociological studies that we conducted before and during perestroika and its aftermath lent credibility to this approach. Between 1985 and 1990, the consolidation of national elites in republics of the Soviet Union had been facilitated by the flurry of publications in national languages. In Russia, informal public associations spearheaded by scientists, teachers, journalists, writers, artists, and other members of the intelligentsia facilitated a similar transformation. Public opinion polls, made possible after the founding of VCIOM (the Russian Public Opinion Research Center), demonstrated that the vector of change was directed by the most advanced societal groups – highly educated young residents of major Russian cities demanding institutional reforms, the foremost of which were ending the Communist Party’s monopoly and establishing a market economy. After the collapse of the USSR, the mass support for political reforms of Gaydar’s government, which was led chiefly by academics and political scientists, gave more weight to this interpretation. However, at the end of 1991, doubts as to whether the intelligentsia was really ‘the elite’ arouse, with the doubts increasing through this decade (Gudkov & Dubin, 1991, pp. 97–99). It soon became clear that the ‘intelligentsia,’ or the educated class, finding itself incapable of putting the proclaimed course of reforms into practice, was yielding leadership to the former Communist/Soviet or economic nomenklatura (now operating under a different name). This forced us to reconsider the interpretation of the intelligentsia as the ‘elite.’ In the standard sociological definition of ‘elite,’ this category is identified as fulfilling three main