From Darkness To Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation In Revolutionary Russia 0822957043, 9780822957041

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Marxism and Russia
1. Marxism as Eschatology
2. The Janus-Faced Messiah
3. The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion
4. The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”
5. Classes Made and Unmade
6. Proletarianization Contested
Glossary
Notes
Index

Citation preview

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT

Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

Jonathan Harris, Editor Published in conjunction with Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University The Harriman Institute sponsors the Studies of the Harriman Institute in the belief that their publication contributes to scholarly research and public understanding. In this way, the Institute, while not necessarily endorsing their conclusions, is pleased to make available the results of some of the research conducted under its auspices.

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT

IGAL HALFIN

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa.  Copyright ©  by the University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper          

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Halfin, Igal. From darkness to light : class, consciousness, and salvation in revolutionary Russia / Igal Halfin. p. cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies) “Published in conjunction with Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.”  ----- (cloth : alk. paper) —  ----- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Soviet Union—History—–—Historiography. . Soviet Union—History—–—Philosophy. . History—Philosophy. . Philosophy, Marxist—Russia. . Philosophy, Marxist—Soviet Union. . Intellectuals—Russia. . Intellectuals–Soviet Union. . Proletariat. I. Title. II. Series in Russian and East European studies. .   .—dc -

 o   a   o y y   y, ay  ,    ,

Ma     ,  ay    

 a  a .

For us, the intellectual has ceased to be a subject, a representing or representative consciousness. Those who act and struggle have stopped being represented either by a party or trade union which in turn abrogates the right to be their consciousness. Who speaks and who acts? Always a multiplicity, even in the person who speaks or who acts. . . . The role of the intellectual is no longer to place himself a “little ahead or a bit on the side” so as to speak the silent truth of all.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Marxism and Russia





1

Marxism as Eschatology

2

The Janus-Faced Messiah

3

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

4

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

5

Classes Made and Unmade

6

Proletarianization Contested  Glossary  Notes



Index











ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Not an autobiography, or a memoir, this nonetheless is a personal book. Raised as a Marxist, I have tried in writing this volume to come to terms with my upbringing. Intellectually, I rebelled. Today I contend that Marxism, with its denial of the present and its dream of total transparency and equality, is a dangerous political doctrine directly responsible for many of the atrocities my parents witnessed. But the passion I still feel for emancipation—for a better, warmer, more meaningful life—remains with me. Emotionally, I suppose, it is impossible to cut all the bonds. For Marxists there is not much of a separation between public and private, and insofar as what I expect to receive from my intellectual pursuits is meaning and happiness, I remain, in a way, a Marxist. It is in this sense that writing this book—despite its origins as a Ph.D. dissertation, with all the mundane exigencies and pressures this entailed—is an intimate event for me. No matter how hard I try, or how skeptical my language becomes, I cannot escape a Marxist belief, naive I know, that reading and writing books can elevate my soul. It is from history, then, that I draw meanings—a fact that puts me squarely in the modernist camp. No number of postmodernist clichés about the “prison house of language” and the “impossibility of authenticity” that I employ throughout this book can conceal this craving of mine. I remained loyal to the tradition of the radical Jewish intelligentsia in yet another way: more than anything else, I sought—and still seek—to engage not an abstract reader who would speak to me through this or that virtual device but an intellectual circle I will into being, a group of concrete individuals who respond to me, agreeing or objecting but never remaining indifferent, individuals who would kindle my heart, not just my mind. I was lucky to find such people. My original debt is to my Israeli friends. They are many, they came first, and without them I would not be where I am now. I

xi

           

intend to thank them elsewhere. Here I want to express my sincere gratitude to those who helped me survive the difficult years of my graduate studies in New York, those who taught me the wonders of Russian history and who persuaded me that it is worth dedicating my life to despite all odds. Jochen Hellbeck, Peter Holquist, and Laurie Manchester inspired me. My ideas on the Russian Revolution bear the imprint of endless discussions with them. While I was writing this book I often could not tell where their ideas ended and mine began. Maia Rigas was always the first to read my hesitant prose. Only when she said my ideas made sense did I know that I was on to something. Maia alone knows how much went into this book. Her patience was endless. Well, almost. I also want to thank my teachers at Tel-Aviv, Dan Diner, Zvi Razi, Nurit Schleifman, Ran Sigad, and Shulamit Volkov, as well as my teachers elsewhere, Katerina Clark, Boris Kolonitsky, Steven Kotkin, Yaakov Roi, Vladimir Shishkin, and Richard Wortman, to whom I owe so many insights into history and theory. With Michael Halberstam I spent many hours discussing the philosophical aspects of my argument. I scarcely would have been able to complete the early parts of this book if not for his generous help and friendship. Many other friends and colleagues helped me a great deal, among them David Hoffman, Nadia Kizenko, Eric Naiman, Chuck Steinwedel, and Amir Weiner. I also want to recognize my debt to Sam Gilbert Jonathan Harris and Michael Zakim, who made many valuable suggestions at the final stages of the preparation of the manuscript. Grants from the Harriman and Kennan Institutes as well as from the Yad ha-Nadiv Foundation and the Israeli Academy of Science allowed me to take the time to complete this project. Also, I would like to thank the Russian Review for its kind permission to use excerpts from my “The Rape of the Intelligentsia as a Proletarian Foundational Myth” (vol. , ). Last, and most important, I want to thank my mentor, Professor Gabriel Gorodetsky, who took me by the hand from day one.

xii

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT

Introduction Marxism and Russia

THAT TWENTIETH-CENTURY Russia embraced Marxism is perhaps the most striking feature of Russian modern history. Brainchild of Marx, the Soviet Union grew up under the shadow of his vision.¹ Marxist visionaries dreamed of a completely transformed society. Nothing of the corrupt and exploitative past was to be retained in the just, pure future. The victims of the old order were destined to become the rulers of the new. The paragon of Revolution—called a proletarian, a Bolshevik, or a Communist, depending on the speaker and the period—was to become transformed into the “New Man” (novyi chelovek).² Russian Marxists attempted to create such a New Man, a strong, free, and conscious creature, totally emancipated from the servile capitalist psyche. The arrival of the New Man promised by Marx was to be the sign that the End of History had come. Humanity was to become true to itself, embarking on a radically new path of free and harmonious development. Oriented toward the future, Marxists viewed the present as a stage in the universal progression toward a communist society. In this sense, I argue, Marxist thought was eschatological. By eschatology I mean here a linear concept of time outlining a prescribed temporal motion of the proletariat from the “darkness” of capitalism toward salvation in a classless society—a motif that fired the Marxist imagination. For the Marxists, historical time had a clearly demarcated end. Marx posited an essential, harmonious man, then narrated the story of his fall and the emergence of class society, and promised salvation at the end of time. Marxist eschatology was a narrative that structured historical time as an 

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odyssey of human consciousness. The bright light of Communism was the final point of arrival, a symbol of human metamorphosis into the New Man. Marxist thinking was preoccupied with history. Temporality and narrative, those structuring themes of eschatology, were at History’s core. The Marxist attitude toward time was ambivalent: time was at once the marker of the duration of human bondage and the source of the hope for an eventual emancipation. Salvation was at once salvation from time, time in which the exploitation of man by man took place, and salvation by time, since time was the medium in which the Messiah was to be born. By calling attention to the eschatological aspects of the Marxist attitude toward time, I do not mean to imply that Russian history evolved teleologically. Rather, my point is that at any given historical moment revolutionaries were deeply concerned with their own position vis-à-vis what was in their eyes the preordained trajectory of Russia’s development. The eschatological structure of the Marxist historical narrative constitutes a special challenge for the scholar of the revolutionary movement, who must separate his own historical narrative from the Marxist metahistory. Otherwise, analysis of the impact of Marxism on history will be unwittingly substituted by the reenactment of the past. In order to separate as rigorously as possible our own insight into the history of Russian Marxism and the growth of the Marxist eschatological consciousness, I propose to move Marxism from the status of subject to the status of object of historical analysis. In much of the postwar historiography treating history as an inexorable social process progressing toward a classless society, the influence of Marxist eschatology is unfortunately dominant. This entraps historians in a historical teleology not unsimilar to what Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig interpretation of history.”³ Instead of immersing ourselves in the question of continuity and change in Russian history and so asking how close Russia was to modernity at the turn of the century and whether the revolution was a logical conclusion or a derailment from the prescribed, “normal” course of historical development (all questions firmly locked within the eschatological metanarrative), we may turn to the investigation of how historical figures interpreted their historical present and located themselves along the temporal continuum ranging from capitalism to Communism. In other words, this book sets out to inquire into the ways eschatological diagnostics was practiced by men and women at the time of the revolution. 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

The assumption that Marxism was informed by eschatology calls for an examination of the “secularization thesis,” according to which the Marxist notion of closed historical time was indebted to Christianity. In both Christianity and Marxism the time framework was thought of as closed, which explains the similarities in the notions of agency and event in the two traditions. Indeed, such essential Christian historical concepts as original sin, the advent of the Messiah, and the Apocalypse found their analogies, respectively, in the Marxist notions of original expropriation, proletariat-intelligentsia savior, and Revolution. Parallel primordial calamities distancing Man from his essential Self set the Christian and the Marxist histories into motion. Similar agents propel History⁴ through similar stages to the final consummation. This being said, the argument here is not that Marxism was a simple derivative of Christianity. Rather, the affinity is explained by the realization that both streams of thought embraced an ur-eschatology. This specific genre of historical thinking connected Marxists and Christians by prompting them to tell similar stories in similar ways. Russian Marxists drew upon manifold, rich, Western eschatological sources, which throws into question the view that Bolshevism was somehow a purely Eastern phenomenon. The meaning of twentieth-century Russian history is trivialized if native Marxism is seen as a degenerated intellectual movement, a stream of thought that allegedly failed to shake off the “backward” cultural baggage of Russia and delivered a dim shadow of the true Marxist light. Such an interpretation explains away the messianic outbursts in Russian history as irrelevant to the Marxist “scientific” theory.⁵ Distinguishing “Western Marxism” from “Oriental Marxism” simply by identifying the latter with messianism is unconvincing.⁶ To the extent that Marxists strove toward human liberation, they all participated in eschatological messianism. The concern with “emancipation” (a secularized rendition of “salvation”) can be traced back to the very core of the Marxist corpus. The messianic overtones of “emancipation” in Bolshevism cannot be dismissed as the bastard legacy of unessential, backward, Asian influences on the otherwise rational, modern, and progressive Marxist dogma. Radical transcendence of the existing society was, rather, a notion essential to Marxism, the very mainspring of Marxism’s ethical drive, and not a Leninist distortion and mystification of Marxist science. By seeking the roots of the Bolshevik messianism in the Marxist theory, I take issue with Moshe Lewin’s contention that the form taken by the Soviet 

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polity “was never part of Lenin’s plan” and that “in the history of the later period, in the events that followed the Revolution and the way in which they molded theory, that [the polity’s] origin is to be found.”⁷ I am in agreement with Tony Polan that, even if it is not easy to establish a precise connection between Marx and the political practices and institutions that characterized the Soviet phenomenon, it is possible to suggest that profound processes were at work, which establish such a link. The apparent distance between Marx’s original ideas and their later Bolshevik versions does not undermine the relevance of discussion of those originals. “Ideas have carriers of their own, and if they are ‘criminal’ carriers by the light of their progenitors they nevertheless testify to what elements of the initial problematic have been found relevant by history.” Polan points out that events in Soviet history can easily be explained by reference to the most obvious influences: “the consequences of a precisely articulated political program, or a rigorously tabulated set of ‘objective’ and ‘material’ conditions.” But, he incisively adds, “they may not necessarily be most adequately explained by such means.”⁸ In this book I set out to show how the transformation of Marxism into the discourse of power in Russia may account for much of the messianic character of Bolshevik politics. If the West observed the Soviet Union with bewilderment, it was not because twentieth-century Russia was a unique region of the globe, marvelous in its monstrosity. Rather, it was because, for a long time, Russia alone was the locus for the realization of Marxism, exhibiting to the world the effects of a uniquely radical ideology. Marxism was as messianic in the West as in the East. But whereas in the West Marxist messianism remained one among many intellectual currents, in postrevolutionary Russia it was endowed with state power and was thus able to realize itself. The Bolsheviks, in any case, never thought of themselves as bearers of a native ideology. “For Lenin,” Maxim Gorky observed in , “Russia is only the object of an experiment designed, in the long run, to take on a universal scope.”⁹ Marxism was the vehicle that transformed the fundamental assumptions at the base of Russian political discourse. Marxism eroded the socially passive, conservative political attitudes of the post-Petrine Orthodox church, which had deemphasized human agency by declaring that attempts to build heaven on earth were heretical. Turn-of-the-century Orthodoxy mourned the fact that “virtues typical of our people the Church taught for ages, such as patience, strength of spirit, reconciliation with fate, are now being substi

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

tuted with their antipodes.”¹⁰ Thus, strikes, a new form of social protest introduced into Russia by the Social Democrats, violated “Christian ethics.” By breaking the commandment to love thy neighbor, the Orthodox press continued, “strikes generate egotism and self-interest. In so doing they contradict Christian teaching about humility and meekness, giving birth to willfulness.”¹¹ By calling for self-knowledge and social activism as prerequisites to salvation, revolutionaries challenged Russian tradition, so much so that even the church, or at least those parts of the church that did not wish to leave the entire field of social struggle to Social Democracy, adopted some of the new activist attitudes so popular in the West.¹² Breaking with many Orthodox doctrines, Russian Marxism augmented others. Marxism was a successful medium for the secularization of Russian politics because it was fed by concerns with human liberation that were embraced by Christian civilization—Eastern or Western. I subscribe to the thesis that Marxism was a “secularized eschatology” because eschatology captures the ambivalent relation of Marxism to the Christian tradition. The term “secularization” implies both the continuity with and the transformation of traditional religious attitudes. The former applies in that Marxism maintained the promise that history moves toward salvation, the latter in that Marxism replaced the interpretation of salvation traditionally understood as an event brought about by God with a rendition of salvation as achieved by humanity alone.¹³ Marxist “activist” messianism did not entirely lack Christian historical precedents on which to draw. Christianity had taken a variety of historical forms. Certainly, the church mainstream tradition encouraged the sort of fatalistic worldview so repulsive to the Marxists. This explains some of the Marxist anti-Christian rhetoric. The famous Marxist dictum, “religion is an opium for the masses,” was specifically a reaction against church condemnation of efforts to ameliorate the human condition. But not all of Christianity’s forms were fatalistic. The Marxists built on the activist spirit of the radical reformation. The latter brought to fruition in Christianity the messianic, voluntarist interpretation of the eschatological promise. According to Erich Fromm: “the mainstream of messianic thinking after the Reformation was expressed no longer in religious thought but in philosophical, historical, and social thought. . . . It found its latest and most complete expression in Marx’s concept of socialism.”¹⁴ If political voluntarism was introduced into the West with the Reformation, Marxism (as part of the post-Romantic cul

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tural climate) was the medium through which Western interventionist politics were introduced into Russia a few hundred years later.¹⁵

The Grip of Eschatology on the Revolutionary Mind The first part of this study elucidates the basic structure of Marxist eschatology. Russian Marxism articulated the relation between historically given man and ideal man by the terms “proletariat” and “intelligentsia.” In class society, matter (embodied by the proletariat) and spirit (embodied by the intelligentsia) were radically separate. The term “proletariat” stood for self-alienated humanity, for men reduced to cogs in the great machine of capitalist production. The term “intelligentsia” stood for the bearers of the genuine spirit in man, for the agency that strove to realize the capacities of the proletariat by setting it free. According to the Marxist philosophy of man, humanity, though in essence free and virtuous, was unconscious of its own potential. Only the intelligentsia (the Marxist intelligentsia, to be precise) could lead humanity to true self-expression.¹⁶ In the Marxist scenario for World History, the proletariat and the intelligentsia were to meet in an eschaton called “Revolution.” Their fusion would herald Communism and conclude the epic of man’s self-division and selfalienation. The Marxist eschatological vision prophesied a radical reform of the human soul, the unification of work and thought, rendering man both an active and a cognizant creature. The New Man could emerge only from the ranks of the proletariat, the class of virtuous toilers destined by Marx to play the part of messiah. Automatized and blinded by capitalism, the proletariat embodied the promise of redemption, not the actuality. Consciousness had to be mastered for emancipation to become possible. To attain emancipation, the proletariat had to absorb the intelligentsia’s spirituality, to appropriate the intelligentsia’s mind, as it were. Marx conceived of the New Man not as a “worker” but as a “worker-intelligent.” The integration of work and thought, not the primacy of either over the other, was the core of the Marxist eschatological quest. Self-awareness (or “class-consciousness,” as the Marxists put it) was carried aloft as the messianic standard. Once proletarians achieved this state, the Revolution was won and the path to Communism cleared. Belief in the salvational role of knowledge was a foundation stone of Marxist eschatology. In this sense, Marxism seems to me to be consonant 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

with Gnosticism. The Gnostic tradition, partly preserved in various strands of Western thought, postulated that the end of time would be brought about by a divine messenger who would awaken humanity and summon it to freedom. Gnostic knowledge injected men with a sense of freedom, turning them from the objects of History into its subjects. In Marxism too, emancipation was to be gained following the reception of the message of truth. My thesis is that the Marxist notion of the intelligentsia took its meaning from the search for something like a Gnostic prophet. Just as the Gnostics needed a divine messenger in order to be awakened to their special status, so too did the self-alienated proletariat need the intelligentsia—the midwife of proletarian consciousness that made the class-messiah aware of its role in History. The indispensability of the intelligentsia in the proletariat’s emancipation scenario suggests that, contrary to a widespread belief, Marxist eschatology deployed not a monistic messiah but a dualistic one. In Marxism, the eschatological agency was split in two: the mind was drawn from the intelligentsia, the body from the proletariat.¹⁷ Russian Marxist thought can be described as fairly homogeneous: a range of very different political figures drawn from the entire spectrum of the revolutionary movement laid similar claims to the identity of intelligentsia and the right to speak in the name of the proletariat. There were important disagreements over which segments of the population should participate in the proletariat-messiah and which political group should speak in its name. But the very fact that a messianic class was sought and the right to speak in its name was cherished allows us to reestablish what Michel Foucault calls the “forgotten solidarities” in the characterization of the Marxist discourse. Foucault captured the essence of the approach adopted in this book by suggesting that, in a historical study, statements can be treated “in accordance with what they have in common; their unique occurrence may be neutralized; the importance of their author’s identity, the time and place of their appearance are also diminished.” What is being measured instead is the extent of the statements, “their repetition in time and place, the channels by which they are diffused, the groups in which they circulate; the general horizon that they outline for men’s thought, the limits that they impose on it.”¹⁸ Foucault’s search for discursive solidarities suggests that attention to acrimonious political debates should be qualified by an appreciation of the common premises of revolutionary thought. Applied to our subject matter, Foucault’s approach shows that no strain 

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within the Russian Marxist movement ever ceased to identify, in one sense or another, with the intelligentsia. The moderate Russian Social Democrats (the Mensheviks) never gave up on the term “intelligentsia.” The more extreme faction (the Bolsheviks) used the term “Party,” which, defined as “the proletarian vanguard,” meant more or less the same thing. No matter the vagaries of the term “intelligentsia,” the premises of Marxist salvational thinking meant that the idea of mediation between the proletariat and its historical role could not be abandoned. All Marxists were predisposed to assert their readiness to deliver the liberating message and awaken the slumbering messiah. Social Democrats of various stripes were unified by the conviction that only the “true intelligentsia”—that is, the bearer of the alienated proletarian self-knowledge (as opposed to the self-seeking pseudo-intelligentsia, which, a false prophet as it were, sought to retard salvation)—could open proletarian eyes. Inversely, all Marxists believed that only the true class-messiah was able to distinguish between the true and the false intelligentsia and to recognize the salvational message for what it was. The Marxist metanarrative assigned a beginning and an end to history and marked out the landmarks between the two points. Even though it provoked endless debates within the Russian revolutionary movement, the Marxist metanarrative provided the sides with a common field of signification without which these debates would have been meaningless. Although the specific significance of events could be contested, the events themselves were invariably regarded as milestones on the road to emancipation. A similar eschatological trajectory informed both the Bolshevik interpretation of the revolution as a crucial milestone on the road toward Communism and the radically inimical Menshevik appraisal of the same milestone as an indicator that the prescribed road had been abandoned. The real challenge was, apparently, to read the signpost correctly. One might call the Marxist discourse of history a hermeneutics of historical signposts. It is important to understand how Marxists translated their historiosophical premises into a specific interpretation of the course of Russian history. Once turned into a basis for action, these interpretations, in their own right, determined the course of events. That answers are shaped by the questions to which they respond is proverbial. Reversing this truism we may add that questions can be formulated only when the realm of possible answers is already known. Although events generated various interpretations, the shared eschatological premise eliminated any historical options that were incongruent with the Marxist escha

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

tological narrative. Russian Marxists posed the following questions: Which class is the bearer of universalism? Have the Russian messianic forces acquired the consciousness necessary to fulfill their messianic mission? Was the revolution of  the true proletarian revolution? or was it merely its precursor? or even a setback? Was the partial restoration of capitalism in the s necessary? or could we leap directly to classless society? And so on and so forth. Whatever lay beyond the eschatological narrative was a nonissue. For example, the liberal idea that the interactions of particular interests will offset each other and create a just social equilibrium was not considered by any of the Russian revolutionary parties—including the Kadets, who were sometimes referred to as the Russian liberals but who, I will argue, shared aspects of the Marxist eschatological view of history. The revolutionary parties not only rejected the relatively static liberal view of society as an opaque space within which special interests were negotiated. They also rejected conservatism, regarded by the Marxists as the movement of the exploiters aiming at the perpetuation of social injustice. Instead, the Russian revolutionary eschatology sought to change society radically, to move society “forward,” not “backward,” to abolish politics, and to open a new, conflict-free, transparent page in the story of human existence. No event escaped the Marxist eschatological prism. Ignoring the eschatological significance that contemporaries attributed to key conjunctions in Russian history would mean impairing our ability to comprehend the actions of the historical actors we study. For Russian Marxists, the development of capitalism in Russia, for example, was not just a natural economic process but one that summoned the messianic agencies that were to bring history to its conclusion. The significance of the revolution, from the perspective of the Bolsheviks, was that the key redemptive event had “already” taken place, while the imperative to grant the bourgeoisie a short respite in the s qualified that diagnosis: the advent of Communism had “not yet” occurred. The closer to completion the revolutionary process was believed to be, the higher the pitch of Marxist messianic zeal.

Agency and Its Language The social historian is informed by a tacit Hobbesian worldview within which historical phenomena are perceived as a blind struggle among social actors who wish to maximize their own power. To the extent that values and ideas 

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are discussed they are understood to be solely the expression of an economic or political interest, or a desire to rise along the social ladder. Assigning a primary role to the Marxist language, I hope to debunk conventional social history’s notion of agency. The view is widespread among students of Russian history that political power was the real issue behind so much revolutionary rhetoric. Historians concur on this issue even if they disagree on nearly everything else. The totalitarian school accounts of Marxism tend to dismiss Marxist language as a camouflage, geared to obfuscate the revolutionary elite’s thirst for power. According to this view, manipulating language and constructing ideological smoke screens enabled the Bolsheviks to cunningly exploit the backwardness of Russian society, as well as the absence of free and liberal political institutions, and to impress their will on the population. Marxist ideological statements are therefore seen by the partisans of the totalitarian school to be more or less conscious fabrications, uttered by politicians to advance their political schemes at the expense of the freedom-thirsty Russian people. In the revisionist rebuttal the Bolshevik language, far from being the language of an elitist minority, was adopted to promote the genuine interests of the toiling classes—a particularly vociferous crew in Russia because of the ostensible weakness of the local bourgeoisie and the social isolation of autocracy. Accordingly, the triumphant revolutionary ideology “expressed” the proletarian sense of entitlement to the Revolution and its heritage. The issue under contestation is clear: either Marxism provided a language suited to the aspirations of the population (as the Bolsheviks would have contended) and was thus legitimate, or Marxist language served as a tool to conceal the preservation of an authoritarian order in Russia while only the facade of this order was changed, in which case language functioned as an oppressive state ideology. In effect, the totalitarian-revisionist debate is a contest between a liberal and a socialist political philosophy. Important as it is, the debate is essentially a rehashing of the cardinal issue already addressed by the historical actors in turn-of-the-century Russia, namely which path should Russia take, capitalism or socialism? The theoretical presuppositions supporting the different interpretations are strikingly similar in that they reduce language to an underlying economic structure, which supposedly determines that language. The revolutionary language is reduced to an epiphenomenon of Russia’s socioeconomic development. To the extent that this language is interrogated at all, it is construed as a medium through which self-seeking agents could articulate their interests. 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

For a historian of the totalitarian school, the reality of Russian history was Russia’s socioeconomic backwardness; for the revisionist school historian the reality of Russia’s history was the radicalization of Russian labor. In both cases, language is restricted to a mediating role between historical actors and a preexisting social reality. The text is dismissed, writes Polan, either because of its “absurdity—an impossible utopianism—or its innocence—a valid libertarianism betrayed by the brutal necessities of subsequent history, or the bad faith of historical actors.” In the totalitarian tradition, the text is either absurd (it becomes impossible to establish a connection between text and consequences) or cynical (the text cannot mean what it says but is only a ploy). Thus, in the first variant of the thought of the totalitarian school, the text is “opaque, allowing no meaning to shine through; in the second, the meaning is distorted, but may be deciphered by attributing deliberate and rational motivations to its author.” By contrast, the revisionists who were sympathetic to Marxism described the text as transparent. Meaning shines through the text. In the revisionist view there is no meaning that is separate from the surface of the text itself. The text escapes interrogation because of its “honesty”; it is unassailable and, therefore, “sacred.” Marxism, Polan concludes, is the channel through which truth expresses itself. “And because the truth has not yet come to pass, it is not in history. That which is not yet in history cannot be examined.” Consequently, historians are supposed to leave eschatology untouched. “It has the status of a myth, and a myth may only be told.”¹⁹ When they come to confront historical materials, both historiographical traditions are interested in how accurately texts “reflect” historical reality. Such an approach generally emerges from an assumption that the language of the sources is unproblematic. The text is assumed to function as a mirror, which reflects the objective state of past events. To be sure, the historian has to ascertain that the mirror is not concave or convex, otherwise truth will be distorted. But the text remains a mirror all the same. Preoccupied with comparing historical narrative with “real” historical circumstances, historians concentrate on understanding the “perspective” from which the story unfolds. They thereby neglect the poetics that structures and invests the story with meaning. The fact that meanings cannot be explained in terms of the interests they supposedly reflect goes unnoticed: “We cannot,” Gareth Stedman Jones has incisively pointed out, “decode political language to reach a primal and material expression of interest since it is the discursive structure of political language which conceives and defines interest in the first place.” Or, 

           :               

as Lynn Hunt writes: “economic and social relations are not prior to or determining of cultural ones; they are themselves fields of cultural practice and cultural production—which cannot be explained deductively by reference to an extracultural dimension of experience.”²⁰ By ignoring the specificity of the language of the historical period they study, historians inadvertently restrict the field of signification to utterances familiar to them from their own language. But trivialization of language ultimately trivializes history. Familiar terms can stand only for familiar things. The uniqueness of historical epochs and enterprises blurs. Everything becomes gray in the reductionist night. Ultimately, the very object of historical inquiry is missed. Attempting to avoid the various pitfalls indicated above, I do not posit a transhistorical subject the expression of whose true interests was, in the case of revolutionary Russia, suppressed or distorted by various ideological systems of power. Instead, I uphold the view that these were the systems of language prevailing in the past that determined what individuals considered to be their interest.

Class as an Eschatological Notion Marxists understood classes as messianic symbols and not as sociological populations. Any distinction between scientific class analysis and messianic prophesying violates Marxist self-understanding and ignores the operation of Marxist language. That the proletariat and the intelligentsia (in particular) and classes (in general) were not meant by Marx as social forces is a leitmotif of this book. To be sure, the social historian realizes that the proletariat and the intelligentsia are not autonomous classes, but agencies that interacted with each other. He also grants that the mutual relations between the two agencies shaped much of modern Russian history. Yet, for him, proletariat and intelligentsia remain social groups that existed before they interacted. Thus proletariat and intelligentsia turn into an objective given: two particularist groups with specific political agendas that either clash or coalesce depending on historical contingency. Rather than study the historical formation of the Russian working class and intelligentsia, I prefer to consider the history of the analytic categories Proletariat and Intelligentsia. Following Jacques Rancière, one may “place on the historiographic agenda an interpretation of class as a conceptualiza

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

tion, not analysis of class as an historical process.”²¹ My claim in this respect will be that the proletariat and the intelligentsia are abstract notions, not empirical entities, and that their ideal unity should be assigned primacy over their historical separateness. In Marxism, the proletariat-intelligentsia was a conceptually inseparable dyad presupposed by the origin of the two entities in the ideal, integrated Man—who both preceded History and was to be its result. The history of the “proletariat” and the “intelligentsia” cannot be separated because, for the Marxist, these two agencies were two equal components of human praxis— working and thinking—in a state of temporary estrangement, an estrangement the abolition of which was the very project that the Revolution undertook to accomplish. To treat the proletariat and the intelligentsia as concrete social groups is to miss their eschatological surcharge, to mistake symbols of salvation for salvation proper. To posit an already extant classmessiah is to fail to understand the gap posited by Marxists between the world as it is (capitalism) and the world as it ought to be (communism). While Marxists hoped that the ideal proletariat would one day embrace the message of the intelligentsia and realize itself as messiah, the proletariat’s transportation from the ideal to the real was to be the End of History, not a mundane historical event within history.²² The obfuscation of the eschatological dimension of the Marxist language leads to a misunderstanding of the conceptual categories deployed by that language. The resulting fallacy has two variants. In the totalitarian variant, eschatological notions are laid in the Procrustean bed of a liberal political narrative. The proletariat and the intelligentsia are divested of their messianic role and reinterpreted as occupational descriptions of potential voters whose “interests” (had liberal democracy come) would have been duly “represented.” Here a liberal persona is ascribed to contemporaries who actually sought “emancipation” and who could not care less about a “fair” representation of their constitutional rights. In the revisionist variant, the historian—assiduously correcting details and opting for one historical scenario over another, claiming that, had this scenario been followed, the revolution would not have been “betrayed”—only reinforces his complicity in the eschatological language taken up by his heroes.²³ The lack of reflection on the role of eschatological language has bred much confusion in the discussion of the Russian Revolution. Was the revolution a “true proletarian revolution”? Or perhaps it was a putsch executed by a 

           :               

Blanquist and power-thirsty intelligentsia clique, acting in the name of the proletariat but against the will of most of its members? Historiography is preoccupied with issues such as these. A particularly fierce debate developed over whether the Russian intelligentsia, qua political agency or qua professional group, really did represent the wishes of the proletarian constituency it claimed to represent. Focusing on the measurement of popular support for the Bolsheviks in , this debate cloaks the eschatological aspirations of the revolution and transcribes the arguments of the time into sociological terms, terms specifically rejected by all the actors on the Russian revolutionary scene. In the Marxists’ discourse, historical agents were not strictly assigned to discrete social categories. Instead, every agent was seen as self-divided, remote from the grace of the harmonious original being—a creature striving to reunite his acting (proletarian) and thinking (intelligentsia) faculties and to become “conscious,” not of his “interests” but of his historical role. From the Marxist perspective, it was clearly nonsensical to maintain the sociological argument that the ultimate legitimacy of the revolution depended on whether the “voice” of the Russian workers was adequately “represented” by the intelligentsia. The analytic framework of social history presupposes fully formed historical subjects—whose will might be “usurped” or “expressed”—and goes on to gauge the “authentic,” “natural” will of these subjects by superimposing upon them secondary socioprofessional designations (subjects as “workers,” subjects as “members of the intelligentsia,” and so on) that the social historian considers crucial clues to the subjects’ real aspirations. Such an approach operated with an already-formed “saturated” notion of the subject, neglecting to investigate the process by which language produces the subject in the first place. The social historian ignores the fact that, according to the Marxist visionaries, the historical subject had not yet been fully constituted. In fact, the question at the center of the revolutionary debate was precisely, How was that subject to be formed? or What were the key components of its identity? The subject, in other words, was for the eschatologically driven Russian revolutionaries a matter of the future, not of the present. Neither the interaction between political leaders and constituency (the key relationship for the totalitarian paradigm) nor the struggle between opposed class perspectives (the central issue for the revisionist paradigm) does justice to the eschatological notion of the revolutionary process as a mediation between the subject and its consciousness. According to the Marxist eschatological narrative, the intelligentsia was the initial custodian of the 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

mythical identity of the proletariat. At the next stage of the eschatological scenario, the proletarian vanguard was to emerge from within the proletariat. Having imbued the proletariat with consciousness, the intelligentsia had to dissolve into the class-messiah. Finally, with the advent of Communism, the gap was to close between the proletarian mass and the proletarian vanguard. It was clearly important to evaluate correctly the distance between the intelligentsia and the proletariat at any given historical moment. The nearer Russia was to the final Revolution, the more conscious the proletariat was meant to be, and the less remote the vanguard from the main proletarian mass. Thus the question of who was at the forefront of the proletarian struggle— the intelligentsia or the proletariat’s own vanguard, the so-called workers’ intelligentsia—was not entirely immaterial to a Marxist. Yet this was truly an eschatological question, with nothing to do with the distinction (so loved by historians) between the intelligentsia class (an entity alien to the proletariat but passing itself off as the proletariat’s representative) and the purportedly legitimate proletariat vanguard (with a genuine right to represent its own class). Marxists could not be further removed from the liberal distinction between the proletariat stripped of self-representation by the intelligentsia usurpers and the proletariat conscientiously represented by advanced members coming from within its own ranks. Marxists understood an intelligentsia’s right to speak for the working class not as a question of political representation but as a question of the eschatological timetable. The identity of the agent that stood at the vanguard of the eschatological process was predicated upon the stage at which the process had arrived—the more the Russian workers resembled a self-sufficient proletariat, the nearer the End of History was believed to be. If the revolution was carried out by the intelligentsia, the Russian proletariat would remain, at least partially, “in itself,” dependent on the intelligentsia, who would continue to exhibit its “for-itself ” messianic character. This was the Bolshevik diagnosis of the Russian Revolution, deployed to justify a variety of state measures geared to instill consciousness in the still backward native proletariat. If, on the other hand, the revolution was carried out by the proletarian vanguard (a situation more likely to occur in the West where the proletariat was “advanced”), the services of the intelligentsia were superfluous. This, the Mensheviks argued, was what would have happened in Europe had the Bolsheviks not derailed history from its course. From this perspective, the Russian Revolution was premature and thus, as it were, eschatologically undesirable. 

           :               

Despite these disagreements over the specifics of eschatological diagnostics, the unanimity of the Marxists on the historical role of the intelligentsia ran very deep. All factions within the Marxist camp concurred that the End of History would involve the fusion of the proletariat with its consciousness and the constitution of a class-conscious proletariat. Equally, all factions accepted that, before history ended, the proletariat was to be tutored by one external agency or another. When Lenin was charged with elitism and authoritarianism, the accusation was made in the name of an intelligentsia eager to expose a pseudo-intelligentsia, one that deluded the proletariat. The true, Menshevik intelligentsia thereby wished to remove an epistemological obstacle from the proletarian march toward its destiny. Whatever the disagreements within the Marxist camp, the status of the vanguard of history, the prophet that showed the proletariat the road to the light, could never be questioned. Elaborating on these themes, I will draw on texts produced within Russian Marxism between the first surge of popularity (circa ) and the consolidation of Stalinism (circa ), amplifying the texts occasionally with quotations from the Marxist canon. The boundaries of the Russian Marxist discourse that generated these texts were in many respects nebulous, especially in the case of geographical boundaries, as many Russian Marxist thinkers lived and published in exile prior to . Thus it is inconceivable to omit from our discussion the seminal texts of Plekhanov, Martov, and Lenin, among others, solely because they worked primarily abroad. In fact, most Russian Marxist intellectual endeavors in the period before the revolution took place not in the imperial capital, where censorship laws were stringent, but in Geneva, Berlin, London, and Brussels. Nor can the Russian translations of French and German Marxists be ignored on the grounds that the authors were non-Russian; their exclusion would amount to the artificial imposition of national strictures on universal-minded thinkers. Translated into Russian and widely read, texts by Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lafargue, and others figured prominently in the thought of the Russian Marxists. Finally, it is not obvious that the boundaries of this discourse were identical with the boundaries of the Social Democratic movement. Even though Social Democrats proclaimed themselves the only true followers of Marx, Marx’s writings were held in high esteem by the Russian Neo-Populists, Syndicalists, and even Kadets, and their positions have at times to be taken into account.²⁴



Introduction: Marxism and Russia

Approaches to the Study of the Early Soviet Period In the second part of this book I proceed to ask what impact Marxist eschatology had on postrevolutionary Russia.²⁵ The relations between Marxism as an intellectual movement and Marxism as a system of power are at the center of my discussion. The year  is significant to the present investigation only insofar as the Bolsheviks believed that revolution opened a new stage in the eschatological journey. Lenin and his peers drew two lessons from their victory: first, that the Russian proletariat had matured into a messiah and, second, that their own party was the only party that had recognized its messianic role and therefore could see itself as the brotherhood of the elect. All other revolutionary parties were unmasked as false messiahs. Russia, the Bolsheviks thought, stood on the brink of salvation, and the task of the Soviet government was to complete the process and inaugurate Communism. The Bolshevik ascendance to power disseminated secular messianism throughout the Russian polity, providing a secularization drive with the leverage to convert the population to Communism.²⁶ I will study the Bolshevik implementation of Marxism in Russia within the time span of the New Economic Policy (henceforth NEP), which coincided roughly with the s. Faced with insurmountable economic difficulties at the end of the Civil War, the Tenth Party Congress () was forced to permit a certain amount of private economic activity. The logic of the Bolshevik worldview dictated that social pollution—that is, the return of alien classes—had to be tolerated temporarily. Situated between the revolution and the social overhaul of the late s, the period of NEP is often perceived as a sort of interregnum between Leninism and Stalinism. Consequently, the meaning attributed to NEP is predicated upon historians’ interpretation of the momentous events immediately preceding NEP, as well as the events that eventually brought about its demise. Social historians who address themselves to the question of NEP set out to explain what went wrong with the revolution, and when precisely its so-called degeneration began. Implicit in such an approach is the assumption that  was a moment of purity, subsequently lost because of the emergence of the militarized command system of the civil war, the authoritarianism and brutality of Stalin’s “Revolution from Above,” and the embourgeoisement of the revolution in the mid-s known as the Great Retreat. Several general explanations have been set forth for the decline of the rev-



           :               

olutionary spirit in the years following . The first explanation argues that the conscious revolutionary proletariat was emasculated and dispersed during the Civil War. The collapse of industry during those turbulent years and the substitution of the proletarian self-administration by the militarized top-to-bottom chain of command supposedly deprived the proletariat of all initiative. A prerequisite for Stalin’s revolution, the conscious proletariat reappeared only in the late s, only to be defeated anew by the new Soviet bourgeoisie. This explanation can be called Neo-Leninist, for it blames not the proletariat or the Bolsheviks but the environment in which they operated for the difficulties encountered by the young regime. A second, and related, explanation for the revolution’s failure maintains that the proletariat and its party degenerated in the process of transformation into the ruling elite. Here, recourse is made to notions such as the proletariat’s “atomization” or “peasantization,” to explain how the conscious proletariat of  was reduced to a malleable mass utterly defenseless against an arbitrary regime. This historiographic tradition can be called Neo-Trotskyist. Its apparent sympathy with the Soviet Union is belied by the view that, from the very beginning, Russian’s economic and cultural backwardness corrupted the revolution.²⁷ The work of William Chase and Lynn Viola is representative of the NeoLeninist explanatory framework. For Chase, the NEP period was a lull between two peaks of proletarian consciousness, a story of the “destruction of [worker] consciousness and . . . its re-emergence as a political force.” Taking the perspective of the working class, Chase maintains that the Civil War destroyed the workers’ “hopefulness and confidence and turned their dreams of a socialism of abundance into nightmares of poverty, misery, disease and near-starvation.” We learn from Chase about the “disintegration of the revolutionary working class . . . the dissolution of its consciousness and revolutionary solidarity,” resulting from workers being “forced into the daily struggle for individual survival.” Chase deplores that “working-class consciousness gave way to individual strategies hastily fashioned to overcome the immediate situation.” Trained in the Marxist dialectic, he observes that the deterioration in working-class living conditions eventually returned class consciousness to workers. After all, the ur-consciousness of  was forged not through the amelioration of worker lives but through the workers’ shared sense of deprivation and growing awareness of their common identity. Why should the radicalization of the labor process not repeat in the s? Stalin’s revolution, 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

in Chase’s mind, was analogous to the revolution of , insofar as both events were precipitated by an enhancement of worker consciousness. “In – the party and workers reforged the old alliance of –. . . . Nineteen-twenty-eight marked the beginning of a period of revolutionary transformation comparable in importance to that of –.”²⁸ Similar to Chase, Lynn Viola believes that Stalin’s collectivization campaign of the late s demonstrated “how the state gained the active support and participation of an important sector of society in the implementation of the revolution in the countryside.” Much like Chase, Viola argues that the termination of NEP “coincided with the final chapter of the Russian Revolution.” Viola is eager to show that Stalin’s revolution was propelled “from below”—by the revamped proletariat—and not forced on the proletariat “from above.” If she is right, Stalin’s revolution should be considered an authentic workers’ revolution. Viola claims that “the most active supporters of the revolution” were the “politically active cadre . . . of the industrial proletariat.” The class-conscious proletarians were those who “helped to implement the Stalin revolution.” Since “the first stage of collectivization was the last spark of working-class consciousness,” Viola labels the historical agents of the collectivization drive “the last of the revolutionaries, the final working-class vanguard.” It is unclear, however, whether Viola means that Stalin’s revolutionary vanguard was the “final” vanguard because the revolution subsequently degenerated, or simply because the revolution reached its conclusion through the establishment of a modern Soviet polity.²⁹ While bowing to the historical necessity of socioeconomic transformation, the Neo-Trotskyist historians, more critical of the Soviet experience, strive to explain why Stalin’s revolution took a particularly nasty authoritarian form. They emphasize the backwardness of NEP Russia and the lack of prerequisites for industrialization to account for Stalinist “distortions” and “excesses.” Most of the Neo-Trotskyist historians argue, in classic Marxist fashion, that Stalin’s order, admittedly monstrous and brutal, nevertheless planted the seeds for the “dialectical sublation” of these features, establishing a modern, urban Soviet society—the indispensable prerequisites of a true democracy. They implicitly suggest that in a savage country like Russia a brutal revolution was necessary if brutality and savagery were ultimately to be abolished. NEP realities are seen here as a dialectically produced mean between the backwardness of Russia and the progressiveness injected into the country by Western Marxism. Scientific Marxism, then, no matter how 

           :               

distorted, remained an important positive force in the Soviet Union. Loyal to Marxism, the Neo-Trotskyists dissociate Marx’s teaching from the fate of the Soviet Union. They blame the retarded conditions of Russia for everything negative in Soviet history and deny any resemblance between the distorted Stalinist manifestation of Marxism and the pure and scientific Marxist original. The works of Roger Pethybridge and Moshe Lewin provide good examples of the Neo-Trotskyist approach. In his study of NEP society, Pethybridge calls on historians to recognize the gap between “the elitist urban heights of the largest country on earth” and the “enormous, all-pervasive hinterland” with its “atrocious” conditions as “the crucial social factor” determining political outcomes during the NEP period. In the same vein, Lewin argues that the backward class structure of NEP “was dominated by the rural sector and small-scale producers and merchants” who disseminated “petit bourgeoism” rather than genuine Marxist values. Lewin cites approvingly Pethybridge’s ironic description of NEP as a period of “large-scale theories versus smallscale realities.”³⁰ These arguments are supposed to explain why the Party and its ideology “degenerated.” Lewin writes that, after , “the Party, the new linchpin of the system, was in the process of transformation. The old revolutionary organization of political intellectuals and politically active workers was steadily being eliminated, and a secretarial machinery reflecting the impact of Civil War and NEP recruits on the social composition of the Party was coming into the ascendant.” The outcome was a degeneration of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat into pure tyranny. By the end of the s, “a situation had been reached such that the membership’s principal function was not really politics, or even ideology, anymore, this being too difficult for the new membership to grasp,” but execution of orders. All that the new Party members understood was “dictatorship tout court, and nationalism.”³¹ In other words, Lewin sees little relation between authentic Communist ideology and the actions of subservient Party functionaries who functioned without idealistic motivations. Pethybridge agrees that the authoritarian nature of Bolshevism was required by the backward conditions of Russia: “Bolshevik hopes for genuine proletarian rule seeped away in the marsh of NEP.” To the question of whether Soviet Russia “could have become democratic quickly under any form of government whatsoever . . . given her political past, her size, variety, climate and relative political and economic 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

backwardness,” Pethybridge responds, “Russia suffered many objective disadvantages that did not permit her to compete” with the Western democratic states. Democracy was a luxury Russia could not afford. Russian backwardness demanded “the degeneration of the Soviet regime . . . quite apart from the political inclinations of the Bolsheviks.”³² These historiographic positions exemplify the logic that typically inspires social history. The metaphorically spatial view of the social whole with a hierarchy of ontological levels—some more basic and therefore privileged as “below,” and others ephemeral and derivative and therefore relegated to the “above”—is carefully preserved. “Politics” is seen as a reflection and an outcome of “social processes.” And even when the independent activity of the “superstructure” is halfheartedly acknowledged (à la Lewin), it is still the social infrastructure that explains why society below was weakened to the degree that the inferior above, in a remarkable feat of ontological arrogance, could gain mastery. Ignoring the eschatological significance of Bolshevik social categories, historians of NEP generally fail to problemize class identities and continue to operate with what they believe to be objective notions such as proletariat, peasantry, or petite bourgeoisie. Frequent mention is made of the “venality” of figures active during NEP: “the frustrating reality of a petty bourgeois country”; the peasants who “exist as a separate class and civilization”; the “petty capitalists,” who persist with their “bourgeois restaurants, and philistine values”—all of them opposed to “the conscious workers of the s,” who finally, toward the end of the decade, had their “horizons enlarged to an extent where they could take in the significance of the Party’s calls for quicker socialist industrialization.”³³ Among the studies adopting this perspective, the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick stands out. Fitzpatrick is more attentive to the fluidity of class categories and their ascriptive nature than most historians of Soviet Russia. She argues that “the Bolsheviks, clinging to their class-based view of the world, were compelled to ‘reinvent’ classes during the s.” In her view, the need to reinvent class was a result of the specific conditions of postrevolutionary Russia, namely “the disintegration and fragmentation of the Soviet working class during the Civil War. By its end, the total number of industrial workers in Russia had dropped to just . . . a third of what it had been in ,” leaving the Bolsheviks, “at least temporarily, the vanguard of a non-existing class.” Fitzpatrick concludes that, during the NEP period, “class was an organizing 

           :               

principle of the revolutionary state whose function was to give coherence to a society fragmented and disoriented by war and revolution.”³⁴ Yet, ever the social historian, Fitzpatrick assumes that the meaning of the “industrial proletariat,” before and during , is self-evident. The proletariat that provided Bolsheviks with the social support that made their  victory possible is conceived of as a conscious, full-fledged historical agent. The irregularity of class formation in the Soviet Union is regarded as an aberration, one explainable in terms of the disintegration of the working class during the Civil War. Although she writes that “the Bolsheviks found themselves victims of Bourdieu’s paradox that in certain socio-political circumstances, classes may arise because Marxist theory requires them,” Fitzpatrick ignores the larger implication of Bourdieu’s argument.³⁵ Her emphasis is on the abnormal effects of Marxism in the face of Russia’s circumstantial backwardness, rather than on the effects of the Marxist theory of classes as such. She believes the imperial class structure was real, and the Soviet class structure invented. The revolution, in this scenario, becomes the story of how objective, conscious, imperial classes degenerated into mere constructs during the Soviet period. Reviewing Fitzpatrick’s work, Stephen Kotkin wonders whether a continual process of reinvention as she describes was underway even before the partial decomposition of what might be called the actually existing working class. No existing working class anywhere had the kind of characteristics, especially the mental outlook, that the Bolsheviks deemed “natural” for such a class. In response to Fitzpatrick’s reluctance to problemize the ideological meaning of class, Kotkin points out that, although she is aware of some tensions within definitions of class, “she neglects another source of ambiguity, that [one] between one’s present class position and the objective class implications of the ideas one espoused. As a result of the latter tension, both hereditary members of the working class and recent workers were frequently found to be harboring alien class notions, for which they were repressed.”³⁶ Those proletarians who did not develop a proletarian consciousness (the eschatological waste, in a manner of speaking) were simply stripped of the title “proletarian.” Fitzpatrick persuasively demonstrates the complexity of the criteria that might be applied to determine proletarian social affiliation during the s. Class origin as well as current occupational position were relevant to an individual’s class status. She concludes that there were no obvious guidelines about the relative importance of the two criteria.”³⁷ These 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

were not just technical difficulties that stood in the way of securing a proletarian identity, however. The issue, rather, was the relation between class and consciousness as posited by the Marxist eschatology. Laboring in production could not make one a proletarian if one’s consciousness fell short of what was expected of a member of a messianic class. Thus, class identity in the Soviet Union was not a technical problem, nor a matter of career politics, but an index of the citizen’s readiness to fulfill his eschatological role. Fitzpatrick’s views are steeped in the theories of the modernization school. In this interpretative framework, political language is mere window dressing, functioning solely to justify imperatives of economic rationalization and industrialization. The social impact of these “objective” processes is the focus of Fitzpatrick’s study. She maintains that the social position of many citizens was ambiguous because of the chaotic and amorphous conditions of the society and the high degree of social and occupational mobility in the revolutionary period. Thus she regards social mobility as a result of the process of modernization. NEP society was “fluid” not because economic transformations were underway, however, but because Bolsheviks launched a process of social purification designed to produce the New Man. This modernization process was not natural, it was man-made. The specifics of the ideology prompting a policy of social transformation must not be ignored to focus solely on the supposedly general features of the modernization process. Through modernization, the Bolsheviks sought to create the prerequisites for the transformation of the entire population of Russia into proletarians. By altering the socioeconomic structure of the country, the Bolsheviks maintained they were undertaking a project of consciousness enhancement. In his study of NEP utopian mentality, Richard Stites dissents from the social historian’s paradigm. He hoists the banner of cultural history, seeing the “above” as relatively autonomous from the “below” and worthy of study in its own right. For Stites, precisely because of “the disastrous condition of the country and the relentless waves of misery unleashed at the time,” the s were the glorious period of “revolutionary dreams.” He believes the “NEP system played a dual role in sustaining utopianism: the relative laxity and pluralism on the social landscape protected it; the more loathsome features of a revived bourgeois culture in the cities helped to fuel it as a counterweight to Soviet capitalism.”³⁸ Stalinism, a policy that declared “war on the dreams,” brought an end to the revolution. To Stites, Stalinism means 

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“Realpolitik, social pragmatism, exhaustion, or even cynicism,” introducing “the art of coercion, authoritarianism, brutality” and a “hostile anti-utopian edge” into the political scene. “Stalinism was a rejection of revolutionary utopianism in favor of a single utopian vision and plan.” In this view the glorious revolution ended not with the completion but with the inception of Stalin’s economic transformation.³⁹ Stites ultimately falls back on the Neo-Trotskyist argument to explain the reversal of the course of the revolution: the backwardness of Russia, he believes, undermined the revolution. The influence of Stalin was reinforced by “many elements of Russian society and culture. . . . The partial ‘traditionalizing’ of the Stalin revolution was a complex amalgam of Stalin’s whim and taste, the longing of the new ruling class for order and familiarity, and the lingering habits and values of the masses.” Again, the culprit is not revolutionary utopianism itself, but Russia’s cultural heritage. “Rooted traditions of popular and religious utopia resurfaced and made themselves manifest in a welter of expressions,” Stites concludes.⁴⁰ Stites pays more attention than anyone else to the content of revolutionary language. The specific nature of the various NEP utopias is addressed seriously and studied carefully. Stites’s characterization of NEP as benevolent is problematic, however. How justified is the contrast between NEP revolutionary creativity (“generated by the Revolution and by the Red victory in the Civil War”) and Stalinism (which Stites describes at times as “utopian”)? Indeed, “the utopian mechanism” of NEP, namely the attempt to lay “foundations in a culture and mode of life that would prefigure the new order,” hardly disappeared in the s. The seeds of the “utopian mechanism” of NEP (which Stites meticulously describes) actually bloomed in the s, a period the Bolsheviks called “the new world,” at long last almost completed. Had Stalin not declared that the transitional fashioning of the New Man who would be fit to live under Communism (the task of the s, according to Stites) had been completely attained and that the New Man had become reality? We could argue that the enthusiastic messianism, radicalism, and utopianism of the s were a continuation and development of the idealism of NEP, rather than a backlash against it. Stalin’s revolution targeted not the Bolshevik utopias so dear to Stites but the so-called backward realities that prevented these utopias from realizing themselves.⁴¹ What Stites dubs “a crueler mode of thinking based on a view that man is sinful, evil, potentially criminal, lazy and stupid” was actually an ultra-rad

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

ical ideology. According to this ideology the Soviet citizen, finally released from the shackles of exploitation, was the incarnation of the futuristic New Man, a species whose theoretical development during the s Stites’s monograph follows with great interest. Stites might respond that one should distinguish between Stalinist rhetoric and Stalinist reality. Such an objection would, however, revive the specter of the sociological reductionism he hoped to dodge in his treatment of the s dreamlike period. After all, the rhetoric of NEP—not the mundane and harsh reality of the period—was Stites’s choice as the object of his study.⁴² Stites apparently wants to save the revolutionary dream of the s from the claws of its brutal culmination a decade later. But his amicable attitude toward the utopianism of early Bolshevism ignores the later consequences. The so-called alternatives of the s should not be considered innocuous simply because they lost out to Stalin. Far from being specific to the s, authoritarianism and terror were the corollaries of modern messianism. Built into the Marxist eschatology, they were advocated by most of the political actors of early twentieth-century Russia.⁴³ Whereas much of the existing scholarship treats the time of NEP as a separate and specific period in the sociocultural history of the Soviet Union, I prefer to understand NEP as a period of transition toward Communism within the Marxist eschatology. The Marxist reckoning of eschatological time called for an intermediary period separating capitalism and Communism— a sort of purgatory. Although the length of this transition was determined by the distance of the social structure of the country in question from the ideal Communist form, a transitional period of some sort, known in the Marxist literature as the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (originally a Western European rather than a Russian concept), was universally necessary.⁴⁴ To be sure, social historians also describe NEP as a “transitional period.” But they understand “transition” as a concrete and specific historical process, undergone by the Soviet Union in the s as it developed into the Stalinist polity of the s. I, on the other hand, use the term “transition” to denote a preordained metahistorical period of time separating the proletarian takeover from the End of History. Taking the concept of “transition to Communism” as a given, social historians seek to examine its referent. By contrast, I investigate the concept’s effects, that is, how it constructed its own referent. Whereas revisionist historians draw attention to an “objective reality”—referred to as “NEP society”—and its influence on Soviet politics 

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and ideology, I propose that the term “NEP society” be understood as an ideological construct, a project in the making. The Bolsheviks distinguished between NEP and full-blown Communism. As long as the New Man was still a work-in-progress, the era was described as the “time of NEP”; once the New Man was completed, “Communism” would have commenced. The term “NEP society” was used by the Bolsheviks to refer to society in transition, a society on the brink of Communism, and need not refer to the “objective” constellation of social forces in s Russia.⁴⁵ The sense of transience inherent in the Bolshevik notion of NEP was a reminder of NEP’s ultimate inadequacy as a final station for the Bolshevik revolution. Perceived not as an economic order but as a state between capitalism and Communism, NEP was the final mediation between the proletariat and its consciousness. For the Bolsheviks, NEP had meaning only as a stage in the development from the Revolution to full Communism. We have already seen that the time scheme of Marxist eschatology had to account not only for the eschaton (which lay in the future) but also for the relation of each present moment in history to the final event. The regrettable “retreat” from Communism during the time of NEP and the partial revival of capitalism in Russia had to be explained in terms of the eschatological progression to salvation. Otherwise, the Bolsheviks would have had to concede the assertion made by Mensheviks that the November  Revolution was premature. Just as early Christian theologians had to grapple with the believers’ disappointment that, although the messiah had come, salvation was not achieved immediately, the Bolsheviks had to bolster the morale of those among their followers who had expected the revolution to precipitate an immediate and perfect Communism. The “Bolshevik time of NEP” might be compared with the so-called Christian earthly time. The theologian Oscar Cullmann has addressed the tension between the idea that the messiah “already” has come and the idea that salvation has “not yet” arrived. The abiding core of the Christian eschatological hope was the faith that, with Christ, “salvational time” made “a great leap forward” and entered into its final phase. The decisive event has already happened and the End cannot fail to materialize. “So long as the fundamental conviction of the ‘already’ is dominant, the belief in the coming end loses nothing of its intensity,” Cullmann explains, though the time of the “not yet” may be quite long indeed. “This confirms once more that the constant basis of the eschatological hope is faith in the ‘already’ and the tension of the intermediate period which goes with it and that the biblical 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

present is properly defined not by a one-sided emphasis on the ‘already,’ nor by a one-sided emphasis on the ‘not yet.’ ”⁴⁶ If we substitute “Lenin and the Party” for “Christ and His followers,” Cullmann’s words reveal the true basis of the Bolshevik conception of the “time of NEP.” He suggests that the success of the  Bolshevik revolution meant that the decisive event had already happened and that history had entered its final phase. The consequential postponement of the inauguration of Communism could not change the inexorable course of history. For the schooled Bolshevik, while the NEP s may have stood for the “not yet,” the “already” of  could by no means be forgotten. “It is not as if the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ balanced the scales exactly. Nor does the decisive mid-point divide the time of salvation into two equal parts.”⁴⁷ The “not yet” is outweighed by the decisive turn of events manifested in the person of Christ, the midpoint faith in whose “already” serves as the foundation for all future expectations. Thus the post- time was quite different from the normal historical time of the pre- period. The postrevolutionary time was a time that was already fulfilled and yet not consummated. Because of a profound ambiguity, “where everything is ‘already’ what it is ‘not yet,’ the eschatological faithful lived in a radical tension between present and future.”⁴⁸ This radical tension between present and future describes the mind-set of the s. With messianic expectations at their peak, the Bolsheviks did not tolerate mundane temporality. All their actions had to make a direct contribution to the attainment of Communism.

Eschatology Fleshed Out:The New Man as a Work in Progress Once the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the Marxist vision of the “working-thinking” New Man started to move from paper to reality. In the interim between the “already” of the revolution and the “not yet” of NEP, the Soviet regime embarked on the construction of the New Man, who was to embody messianic purity and virtue. The eschatological imperative to synthesize the best features of proletariat and intelligentsia and to create the preconditions of Communism explains the transformation of the universities into the site of the New Man’s production. Academic enlightenment and proletarianization of the higher educational institutions went, in the Bolshevik mind, hand in hand. In his study of the Bolshevik attempt to create the ideal proletarian body 

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politic, Peter Holquist suggests that we view this enterprise as a “project-inprogress.” The project framed the tasks to be pursued (the creation of the New Man) and legitimated the means to pursue them (proletarianization).⁴⁹ Translating Foucault’s power/knowledge dyad into an analytical framework meaningful to the study of Bolshevik eschatology, Holquist equates knowledge with the Bolshevik statistical-bureaucratic representation of society designed to identify what eschatological agencies operated in it. Put another way, “knowledge” resulted from scientific endeavors that did not just determine what classes existed in Russia but also actively identified what members of which classes could be turned into the New Man and how. Knowledge, thus, corresponded to the “project” side of Holquist’s “project-in-progress” formulation—the New Man as a work-in-progress. “Power,” the second half of Foucault’s formula, described the repertoire of practices employed to realize the New Man as posited by “knowledge.” Power can therefore be seen as the “in progress” side of this “project-in-progress” formulation. Thus the Bolshevik enterprise was not only an intellectual abstraction but also a system that contained simultaneously the imperative to realize itself and also an outline for doing so. Most of the material for the second part of this study comes from the Soviet universities. Heretofore, this subject was the domain of the sociologically and demographically minded historians. But what happened in the Bolshevik institutions of higher education is worth close attention also because they were supposed to mint the ideal-type Bolshevik, the paragon of the New Man. By examining the Bolshevik dissemination of a new set of identities among students, I am able to come to grips with both the theory and the practice of the Bolshevik attempt to remake the human psyche. Marxism clearly permeated the mind of the Soviet student and became a guide to his everyday actions. Throughout the s, Soviet universities were a grand laboratory, designing techniques for the perfection of humanity. The crucial novelty of the new student was supposed to be his proletarian origin and his ability to articulate his identity and worldview in class terms. In the universities, knowledge had to be wrested from the old intelligentsia—while the new intelligentsia, able to use this knowledge for salvation, had to be formed. What effects did the proletarianization policy have on the universities? What terms did contemporaries use to discuss it? What kind of intelligentsia did the Bolsheviks intend to create? What institutions, symbols, rituals, and narratives of identity brought the new intelligentsia into being? These will be the questions posed directly in chapters  and  of this study. 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

I shall examine the Soviet student body not as a social tissue but as a “discursive artifact,” an “imagined community,” which the Bolsheviks tried to mold to what they claimed Soviet society in general should become.⁵⁰ The term “discourse” does not stand merely for “language” but, much more precisely, for the combination of ideological articulations and political practices as conceptualized in Foucault’s power/knowledge dyad. By discourse, Foucault does not mean “the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted” but, rather, “the ensemble of rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true.” Discourse generates regular effects of power. “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics of truth’: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned . . . and the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”⁵¹ In Soviet Russia of the s the discourse of class enveloped all spheres of academic life. This was true of the language of Party leaders, educational institutions’ managerial staffs, intermediary bureaucratic bodies, university administrations, sociologists, literary people, and finally, and most important, the students themselves. The discourse of class was instrumental to the construction of the ritual of words and deeds that governed students’ behavior and self-presentation. The various microstructures of power operating in the university adjudicated debates regarding students’ social identity and consciousness and were therefore in a position to interpret the hegemonic—but never definitive and univocal—meaning of the New Man. Regardless of the multiplicity of layers, class discourse was remarkable for its unity. Ubiquitous and omnipotent, it was hardly ever challenged. Although they often disagreed with the Bolshevik academic policies, students leveled criticism against them in the name of the principle of class. What was at stake was the correct interpretation of the discourse of class, not whether it was appropriate or not. In her otherwise careful study of the development of the Soviet educational system, Fitzpatrick treats Marxism as no more than incidental. “Stalin used Marxist language,” she writes, “but his real interest was in a process which is almost completely ignored in Marxist theory—social mobility.” In her opinion, Stalin believed “the Soviet regime, like any other, needed its own elite,” which had to be created “through upward mobility from the working class and peasantry and the workers.” Stalin was “interested in those with 

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the potential for promotion.” Thus, in effect, Fitzpatrick understands proletarianization of the Soviet universities as a deal between the Bolshevik regime and the Russian working class. According to the terms of this deal, the regime increased the prestige of the working class, while workers in return lent the regime political support. The proletarianization of higher learning emerges from Fitzpatrick’s writings as a social process triggered by economic modernization, an offshoot of the economic imperative to train the manpower needed to set modernization in motion. The Bolshevik leadership realized “it was imperative to begin training a new generation of cadres who would be both Red and expert,” cadres on whose expertise “the impending industrialization drive” was likely to rely. Fitzpatrick gives a picture of the universities as arenas for a large-scale advancement of workers into full-time higher education. Seen this way, proletarian education had little to do with the dissemination of the language of class and the creation of the New Man. If anything was inculcated into Soviet students, Fitzpatrick seems to believe, it was technological know-how and a sense of loyalty to the regime. “It seems likely that in Stalin’s Russia large segments of the population linked upward mobility with their own particular form of government. And such a perception might well be the major factor in the legitimization of the regime.”⁵² The modernization school plays down the effects of proletarianization during NEP period. Both Fitzpatrick and David Lane, a student of Bolshevik proletarianization policies in the s, seem to agree that there was little significant change in the social composition of students before , and that only during the period between  and  did large numbers of workingclass youth enter higher educational institutions. Although he maintains that changes in the class composition of the student body did take place in the s, Lane emphasizes the limited scope of such changes. He explains the perpetuation of the educational patterns of the tsarist era into the s through two factors: the persistence of traditional educational habits of the lower classes and the conservatism of their vocational expectations. This conservatism defeated the efforts of Narkompros, the Soviet equivalent of the ministry of education, to create a proletarian student body. Fitzpatrick argues along similar lines: “In , the Bolsheviks had little expertise of their own to draw on, and ten years later the situation remained basically unchanged. In , less than one percent of Communists had completed higher education, but even this small group was of limited practical use in providing technical expertise. . . . In the institutes of higher education work

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

ing class and Communist students remained a minority, despite admissions discrimination in their favor.”⁵³ James McClelland, another student of the proletarianization of the university during the NEP period, adopts the opposite view, arguing that “the assessment of success or failure depends on how one defines the task. Critics tend simply to note that in the late s students of non-worker origin were more heavily represented in Soviet universities than those of worker origin, and to conclude from this fact that therefore the proletarianization policies had clearly failed. . . . Rather than adopting the unachievable norm of complete social equality, one should inquire whether or not Narkompros had succeeded by  in reducing the rate of inequality among social classes in higher education enrollments.”⁵⁴ McClelland asserts that Narkompros had succeeded and shows that the process of the proletarianizing of the Soviet student body was very rapid in comparison with other modernizing countries. I should like to emphasize, however, that all these scholars employ social history techniques to support their views. They carefully analyze the existing data on the pre- and postrevolutionary composition of the student body to produce a classic sociological argument: social structures cannot be altered at will and the rhetoric of the Russian revolutionaries, with all its emphasis on radical breaks, only conceals long-term continuities. Fitzpatrick, who emphasizes change rather than stability of social structures, nevertheless regards the processes launched by the  decision to industrialize at maximum speed to be the radical historical watershed in Soviet history, thus lending support to the view that proletarianization did not go very far before NEP was terminated. The debate on the composition of the student body in the s, with McClelland on one side and Lane and Fitzpatrick on the other, is based on the assumption that class is an objective entity that can be measured. The constitutive role of discourse in making classes is ignored. Thus, for example, each of these scholars takes Soviet statistics at face value. So much concentration on the validity of the data—in this case that pertaining to Narkompros educational policies—leaves unquestioned the paradigm that drove the data collection in the first place. By accepting the categories guiding the collection of information we unthinkingly accept the issues and problems constituted by the Bolshevik discourse of the s. As often happens, the sociological analysis of statistics leads to a preoccupation with quantities and a complete neglect of those qualities the numbers are 

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supposed to represent. I prefer to concentrate, not on the degree of success or failure of the proletarianization policies of the Soviet student body, but on the logic that imbued these policies with meaning and set their parameters in the first place. My study of proletarianization opens with a discussion of the seizure of the universities by the Bolsheviks. Next, I turn to the meaning the Bolsheviks attributed to “proletarianization” and to the debates within the Party elite over the relative merits of the different classes. For me, the proletarianization of the universities was less a matter of changing their social fabric than a process of introducing the discourse of class into the universities. I devote a great deal of attention to the microtechniques through which Marxism was inculcated into the student body already during NEP. Soviet students had to embrace the Bolshevik messianic persona and become themselves the “proletarian intelligentsia.” They had to identify themselves by means of the discourse of class. The student poetry and the iconography of student broadsheets, magazines, and newsletters of the time reveal to what extent students identified themselves as proletarians striving toward the redeeming light of Marxism. NEP class statistics were another important index students could use to distinguish the differences between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” class attributes. University admissions statistics are scrutinized here not as quantitative data but as a qualitative text. According to the view I defend here, statistics were not a mere presentation of reality but an active force in its shaping. By showing the indeterminacy of class categorization methods, I hope to demonstrate the constructed nature of the Bolshevik class typology. My focus on the role of state institutions in creating class is inspired by Ian Hacking’s insight that “the bureaucracy of statistics imposes not just by creating administrative rulings but by determining classifications within which people must think of themselves and of the actions that are open to them.”⁵⁵ In order to construct the proletariat, Narkompros statisticians developed a sophisticated scheme for translating traditional identities and individual biographies into class denominations. Students, in turn, learned to identify themselves in the new vocabulary of class. My claim will be that, in the process of looking for the “real proletarians” who deserved higher education, the Bolsheviks actually brought these “proletarians” into being. State institutions did not simply cast their nets and draw in the existing proletarians. Rather, individuals within various occupational, estate, or ethnic categories 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

were made into “proletarians” by “proletarian organs” once they were accepted to universities.⁵⁶ Embedded as it was in institutional practices, the discourse of class shaped social realities, defined peoples’ social positions, and when internalized by individuals became a means of self-identification. University admissions statistics taught students which classes could exist in the transitional NEP body politic and which had no place in it. The social engineering university students were to submit to was premised on the view of the body politic as one that required constant purification. The practice of distinguishing pure and impure students through shifting poetical and political criteria continued throughout the s. The Bolshevik regime admitted “proletarians” into the universities in order to enlighten them and turn them into New Men. Concomitantly, the regime expelled students who were inimical to the new system, the “class aliens” who allegedly hoped to continue monopolizing knowledge. In the new Soviet university, knowledge was supposed to be not a tool of bourgeois social control but a vehicle of proletarian emancipation. The study of university purges is meant to complement my examination of university admissions. The university purge was seen by contemporaries as a “purifier” of the student body. Only those capable of attaining messianic consciousness were to remain within the walls of the university. The purge was a ritualized contestation of student class identity. The central argument here is that it was not students’ objective class affiliation but their capacity to manipulate the Bolshevik class poetics to produce a certain “class effect” that secured them the desired proletarian identity and a place in the university. Here I distinguish between the politics and the poetics of the purge. By “purge politics” I mean the students’ defense of their claims to proletarian identity. By “purge poetics” I mean the students’ construction of autobiographical narratives according to prescribed Marxist genres. The identification of “class aliens” was intimately intertwined with the identification of “proletarians.” To describe a “bourgeois” was to describe someone who was not proletarian and who therefore did not deserve to belong to the Soviet body politic. Beyond the attempt to illuminate a particular aspect of Soviet administration and culture, the discussion of admissions and purges serves as a springboard for investigating a more general practice—the production and inculcation of model narratives about political legitimacy. In order to gauge the discursive solidarity of the various Russian revolutionary groups in the years following , I conclude with an overview of 

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responses to the Bolshevik proletarianization policy, ranging from the ultraradicals to the moderate Kadets. We shall follow in detail the struggle waged to determine the nature of the messianic agency to be promoted in the universities. While the Mensheviks and the syndicalists concurred with the Bolsheviks that the workers deserved the privileged position, the Social Revolutionaries believed the peasantry deserved to share the messianic role. The more inclusivist Kadets agreed that some sort of university proletarianization should be attempted but not at the price of wholesale discrimination against the professional middle class. On a deeper level, however, we shall see that the various Russian Marxist political parties shared assumptions regarding the desirability of university proletarianization. The debates over the correct implementation of proletarianization evolved within the parameters of a common belief that history moved toward the end of time and that proletarianization, geared to unite the messiah with his consciousness, contributed to history’s consummation.⁵⁷ This corroborates the thrust of my argument that the revolutionary discourse was unified in its eschatological aspirations. The messianic discourse established in the Soviet Union was not produced artificially and should not be attributed solely to the effectiveness of the Bolshevik repression apparatus. Although outside the sphere of the power of the secret police during the s, the anti-Bolshevik émigré publications did not generally take advantage of their liberty to criticize the very core of the Bolshevik project of social engineering. While targeting the specifics of the Bolsheviks’ attempt to build a New Man, the Bolsheviks’ foes, be they Mensheviks, SRs, or Kadets, accepted its guiding principles. Extending the examination of the proletarianization discourse beyond the Bolshevik camp has an additional advantage. It appears that the terms of the debates between the Bolsheviks and their political rivals continue to define the issues for NEP historiography. Historians of Bolshevik Russia often reach conclusions that are little more than a reassertion of positions already assumed by historical contemporaries. As we have seen, most historical inquiries into Bolshevism return to the understanding of history as the story of the struggle between the agents favored by historians because they appear progressive and the agents who supposedly retard progress. Some historians argue that the intelligentsia, the so-called “conscience of the revolutionary movement,” was the victim of the Russian Revolution. Others maintain that the virtuous, if naive, working class was betrayed by power-hungry Blanquist intellectu

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

als. A third scenario advances the candidacy of the innocent muzhik as the true soul of Russia and the ultimate victim of Bolshevism. Needless to say, all these historiographical stances merely echo positions taken by contemporary historical actors: the first comes close to the Kadet view; the second to the Menshevik view; the third to the position of the Social Revolutionaries. Remarkably, the spectrum of historiographical opinion does not diverge from the revolutionary political spectrum. As Kotkin observed, the categories historians employ “are trapped within the terms of the phenomena they are trying to analyze. Moving from the primary to the secondary sources, one is struck by the extent to which the categories and debates of contemporaries pervade subsequent ‘analyses.’ ”⁵⁸ It seems that the historiography of the Soviet s has benefited little from historical hindsight. Too many histories of the first socialist fatherland read like elaborations of the interpretive frameworks (eschatological through and through) bequeathed by the Russian Revolution. The explanation of events of Soviet history in terms of the “interests” of the social actor—whether he be the egalitarian worker striving for social equality or social advancement; the gullible peasant, dizzy in the big city, who is searching for a new father figure; or the intelligentsia, eager to apply political ideologies to the body politic—employs a Marxist ontology. Even as they dispute the specifics of the Bolshevik analysis, historians embrace the discourse of class, consequently imputing significance to the same agents the Bolsheviks deemed allimportant.

Eschatology and the Bolshevik Subject In the historiography of revolutionary Russia, the objectivist method of social history has even penetrated into a domain that at first appears especially immune to objectivist historical methodologies—the study of private texts. Personal identity narratives are seen by social historians as an important source for information concerning class reality, being subjective representations of the social process held to be in some sense objective. But in reading personal accounts as transparent descriptions of life in the s, we reproduce— without analysis—historical subjects’ views of themselves. In assuming that personal documents “register” the authors’ perception of events, we assume that reality preceded its interpretation. The mechanism through which interpretation produced reality is thereby overlooked. To give meaning is to 

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alter, to construct—not merely to reflect. When we read subjective narratives as transparent traces of a real past, we ignore the enormous effort contemporary subjects invested in the construction of their private selves according to the Bolshevik model.⁵⁹ In his study of the diaries from the Stalinist period, Jochen Hellbeck shows how the Soviet system of social identification pervaded the individual’s personal domain. Taking the approach that power and meaning are interdependent, and therefore inseparable, Hellbeck disputes the familiar dichotomy between the individual and the Soviet order that so much historiography has taken for granted. Hellbeck criticizes the notion that state power was largely an exercise of physical violence and ideological influence “in total opposition to the individual self, which is understood as an essentially pure and powerfree domain.” He argues that an individual living under the Bolshevik system “could not conceivably formulate a notion of himself independently of the program promulgated by the Bolshevik state. An individual and the political system in which he lived cannot be viewed as two separate entities.”⁶⁰ Like Hellbeck, I do not set myself the goal of measuring the effects of the Bolshevik regime on individuals. Instead, I seek to locate this system within the individual student whose personal writings I examine. The pitfalls I want to avoid might be compared to those that would emerge from an unproblemized reading of the life of a medieval saint. Such a vita cannot be seen as the exact account of the life of a devout believer. The lives of the saints were restructured within a narrative framework meant to convey to the community not the dry facts of the saints’ lives but their religious meaning. Thus it is the form of the vita, not its content, that is most interesting. The poetics of an autobiography need not be treated as an obstacle to be removed. Instead, poetics can serve as a fascinating object of investigation in its own right, one that can open a window into the values with which Bolshevik poetics was infused.⁶¹ Bolshevik class identities were produced through poetical means. They were not the automatic results of a social process. Employing the tools of literary analysis, I attempt to unearth the rules of the genre in which Bolshevik student supplications, biographies, personal letters, and various other forms of identity narratives were inscribed. Class identity was built through a variety of parameters, starting with dry statistical social categories in which every Bolshevik had to find his niche and ending with complex poetic conventions that told the reader whether he had come across a proletarian or a bourgeois 

Introduction: Marxism and Russia

life story. The subgenres of the Bolshevik discourse of class provided the poetical means by which a given class identity was to be created; worker, peasant, and intelligentsia identities demanded distinct forms of self-presentation. The discourse of class defined the Soviet self, that is, students did not only manipulate class discourse for their own interest, they were also in turn manipulated by it. Class terminology provided Soviet students with the bricks from which their self-identity was constructed. Historical subjects did not precede the discourse they used but were to a considerable degree structured by it. By regulating a set of social identities, the Bolshevik discourse brought into being the very classes it claimed to represent. Soviet society was an “arena of class struggle” not because such were the implications of the objective socioeconomic developments of Russia but because Marxism was adopted in Russia as the official discourse. The unification of Marxism and power set the Russian body politic onto a course of self-purification in which negative class elements were filtered out of the body politic. The ultimate goal prescribed by the Bolsheviks for the body politic as well as for the individual was unequivocal purity and transparency—the prerequisites for Communism. The Bolshevik identity narratives produced a society that thought of itself in terms of class purity. The official discourse had the power to determine not only what a Soviet citizen said but also (at least in part) what he desired. Our examination of the construction of the Soviet identity should not be thinned out by the baseless assumption that all humans at all times have had the same desires. The Soviet subject was unique and fascinating precisely because it entertained messianic aspirations. Marxist eschatology shaped the identity of the Soviet citizen; it did not just coerce preexisting, fully formed citizens to adjust to a Soviet reality that was somehow external to them. None of the above means to claim that identities were mandated without recourse to power. In the production of meanings, the Bolsheviks practiced techniques of power that defined the boundaries of sense, delineated the implications of various identities the subjects took on, and described the sanctions against adoption of undesirable or impure identities. Here we find yet further proof that discourse analysis cannot be limited to the study of texts, since meaning cannot be constituted outside the power system that supported it. Meanings exist only within a system of practices, a tissue of power relations delineating a realm of the possible. Bourdieu writes that a “political intention can be constituted only in one’s relation to a given state of the political game and, more precisely, of the techniques of action 

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and expression it offers at any given moment.”⁶² For me, the dictum that “there is nothing outside the text” means that blind power—the radically extratextual—does not exist. It is impossible to speak of an extralinguistic historical reality since power is always steeped in meaning. Inversely, there can be no poetics devoid of power effects. Specific ways of producing texts carry specific consequences. Literature does not passively reflect life but supplies models and norms of behavior that life then imitates.⁶³ The realization that poetics leaves traces—that it is a relevant subject of historical (and not only literary) interest—necessitates a reconsideration of the distinction between the real and the fictional. Shaping student identities and prompting Bolsheviks to think of each other in terms of purity, the Marxist eschatology was made, in a sense, real. Some historians have naively suggested that documents infused with Bolshevik poetics capture reality in an “artistic” or “imaginative” manner and are therefore fictional representations of the real. Those who make such suggestions go on to say that serious historians should pursue other, truly real Bolshevik documents, transparent documents that reflect the truth as it really was and not as it was represented. I propose that this line of reasoning be reconsidered. In early twentiethcentury Russia, what was real was the revolutionary discourse itself. Dreams —messianic dreams—made the Soviet reality into what it was.



Marxism as Eschatology

1

IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES, I would like to outline the basic features of Marxist historical mythology, linking it with the Western religious and philosophical concern with human salvation. My core argument is that the attempt to provide scientific principles of historical analysis and to break away from the messianic interpretation of history sponsored by the Church was in fact in many ways unsuccessful: underneath the seemingly new Marxist methodology were concealed older concerns with historical time and redemption. Marxists would doubtless have renounced notions such as good, evil, messiah, and salvation as baseless religious superstitions that had nothing to do with the revolutionary experience. Yet these concepts, transposed into a secular key, continued to animate Communist discourse. Marxist grammar, broadly understood, was analogous with the traditional spiritual idiom. The historical master plot was assimilated into the language of Marxist socialist humanism, which substituted “consciousness” for “soul,” “comrades” for “faithful,” and “classless society” for “paradise.” This work of translation and transcodation—key to the workings of the Communist’s language—remains well disguised from the gaze of any intellectual historian who accepts the Marxist pronouncement of a break with tradition at the expense of the unarticulated but highly present discursive continuities. Marxists did not ask themselves why they considered time to be linear and consciousness to be salvational, and this was precisely how they failed to notice the affinity of their own thinking with Christian messianism. Such an oversight is not surprising. Dominique LaCapra points out that “questions 

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are always situated in a context of a ‘life world’ that cannot be fully objectified or fully known. . . . It is only by investigating what a thinker did not explicitly or intentionally think but what constitutes his still question-worthy ‘unthought’ that a conversation with the past enters into dimensions of his thinking which bear most forcefully on the present and future.” Pierre Proudhon, whom Marx called his “utopian precursor,” noted that the premises of socialist thinking could not be problematized but had to serve as axioms, the foundation for the very possibility of thought. “Forced to proceed as a materialist, that is to say, by observation and experience, [I have to] conclude in the language of a believer, because there exists no other. . . . Without it we simply do not think.” The presuppositions of a discursive formation that determined what was meaningful and what was not cannot be discussed without undermining the entire discursive edifice.¹ Eschatology is generally considered to be a Judeo-Christian contribution to Western culture. The eschatological notion of time was, for example, quite different from the Greek understanding of historical time as cyclical. Ancient thinking revered the past, not the future, and attributed to the human world a cyclical pattern exemplified by natural life.² This temporal pattern, applied to the world of human affairs, described the continual growth, maturity, and subsequent decline of city-states, a pattern that was thought to repeat in cyclical fashion. Eschatological thinking supplanted this model and introduced the novel idea of a unique world history guided by a single principle and directed toward the consummation of that history. The eschatological conception of history rendered prospective a view that until then had been retrospective. The Marxist concept of universal History was essentially inspired by the Judeo-Christian bracketing of historical time between the Fall of Adam and the Apocalypse. The Original Expropriation, at the beginning of time, represented a rupture in the timeless primitive Communism, which inaugurated History and set humanity on a course of self-alienation. The universal Revolution, an abrupt and absolute event, was to return humanity to itself in a fiery cataclysm. The series of stages in the interval between the Original Expropriation and the cataclysm was understood as a great progress of history that would climax with the abolition of class society. Here, eschatology indicated this linear conception of historical time understood as movement toward the consummation of History. Imbuing time with a historical teleology that gave meaning to events, Marxist eschatology described history as moral progression from the darkness of class society to the light of Communism.³ 

Marxism as Eschatology

Because history is seen as a redemptive process, the Beginning and the End of History were structured as pure, conflictless states. Having postulated an ideal past, eschatology projected this into the future as the telos of history. The chronological markers of Beginning and End were valorized. What has to reign in between was seen as evil. The Beginning and the End have been called Paradise (the time when the lion lay down with the lamb) and Communism (characterized by the fraternity of human producers). The interim was the “kingdom of sin” or the “period of the exploitation of man by man.” Since the agency that brought about change between the Beginning and the End had to be accounted for, eschatology posited a messiah (“Christ” or the “proletariat-intelligentsia”), who was able, due to some remarkable feature in constitution, to overcome the impurities of the middle period and effect a transition from impure to pure, from evil to good. Eschatology set out to explain what propelled the historical plot toward consummation. The principle it postulated was contradiction, which, in the words of Schelling, “is life’s mainspring. . . . If there were only unity then truly nothing would want to stir, and everything would sink into listlessness.”⁴ Christians believed that the combat between the righteous and the sinful would reach its apogee in the Apocalypse. Hegel translated the picturesque representation of the struggles within the biblical eschatological narrative into a rational philosophical system. In the Hegelian (and Marxist) vocabulary, the personalized contradictions of the Christian redemptive plot were called the “dialectic.” For Marx, social contradiction was an immanent historical force that was to transform society and induce it to produce a messiah. Positing a succession of modes of production, each with its own inherent contradictions, Marx did not let them stand as an endless procession. Rather, he interpreted them as stages leading to a final event, which was to resolve the contradictions immanent in history. Although I present certain trends in religious thought as likely precursors of Marxist eschatology, an exhaustive inquiry into how ideas were transported from one historical period to another is not undertaken below. I do not ask what ideas preoccupied Marx and his epoch. Nor do I attempt to read the succession of eschatologies through the eyes of the contemporaries themselves.⁵ The growth of the human spirit leading up to the Marxist prophecy is relevant only if an eschatological perspective is taken and the conception of history as a story of consciousness-growth that reached its apogee with Marx is uncritically reproduced. Situating myself outside the Marxist masternarrative, I look for intellectual debts disavowed by Marx. Christian and 

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Gnostic eschatological themes were repugnant to those who considered Marxism a science. That such themes might be preserved within the core of Marxism would be precisely because they remained the Marxist “unthought.” In showing that the Marxist and Christian eschatological narratives shared comparable plot structures, similar agents driving these plots forward, and sometimes even the metaphors and figures used to describe them, I do not mean to suggest a historical translation of individual Christian notions into Marxism—say from “elect” to “revolutionary,” from “sinner” to “capitalist,” from “devil” to “counterrevolutionary,” and so forth. While the obvious affinities between these notions have to be acknowledged, they did not necessarily stem from cultural influences, such that a specific Christian notion gave rise to a specific Marxist notion, for example. Instead, I argue that these affinities rose out of the uniformity of the Christian and the Marxist eschatological plot structures.⁶ Any comparison I suggest between Christianity and Marxism serves an analytical, not a historical, function. My reference to biblical terms throughout is no more than a heuristic device intended to evoke the deep plot of the eschatological master narrative. For example, the claim that the proletariat is a messiah should be understood as an attempt to flesh out, by analogy to the Christian model in which liberation was also the goal of history, the meaning Marxists invested in a class that was supposed to redeem humanity. This claim is not an invitation to seek the cultural origins of the notion of the proletariat in the image of Christ. I take the structural-poetic and not the anthropological-historical approach to eschatology. Although some historical antecedents of Marxist myth will be considered below, it is not my intention to undertake a comprehensive examination of the Christian roots of Marxism. The discussion in the present chapter has a more modest aim: to alert the reader to certain eschatological principles which propelled Marxist thinking, foregrounding the concepts that will be used in the next chapters. I use the discussion of the various eschatological plots to approach an archetype of eschatological thinking as such, and thereby to elucidate the implications of my argument that Marxism was a form of eschatology. What follows is tentative, and projected as a tool with which to approach the eschatological core of Marx’s historical analysis.



Marxism as Eschatology

Marx and the Salvational Concept of Time The best-known formulation of the view that the Marxist notion of historical progress is a secularized version of providential Christian eschatology is found in the work of the German philosopher, Karl Löwith. Löwith claims that the Marxist philosophy of history replicated the Christian faith in a fulfillment of the world’s history through “final” events. Pointing to our preoccupation with history and historicity, he is inclined to believe that modern historical consciousness originated with the Christian eschatological outlook: “If we venture to say that our modern historical consciousness is derived from Christianity, this can mean only that the eschatological outlook of the New Testament has opened the perspective toward a future fulfillment— originally beyond and eventually within, historical existence.”⁷ Several scholars reject Löwith’s thesis, with Hans Blumenberg perhaps the most notable among them. In Blumenberg’s view, the scientific—or “modern”—concept of historical progress is open-ended and incremental, not eschatological and closed as Löwith argues. I am interested in defending an aspect of Löwith’s secularization thesis, namely that the Marxist notion of progress was eschatological and that Marx indeed endorsed a closed notion of historical time as a continuum between the emergence of class society and its transcendence. To support my claim, I will try to disprove another distinction between Christianity and Marxism, drawn by Blumenberg and others, namely that it was “God” who was the Subject of History in Christianity, and “Man” the Subject of History in Marxism. I contend that, in the eschatological scheme, the Subject of History, whether God or Man, is an abstract agency that is both the driving force of History and the source of its meaning. In Christianity and Marxism alike, real empirical man had to come to know this abstraction and merge with it. The recognition of God by humans, the unification of humanity with its authentic self, was supposed to bring History to an End. History, in Marxism, is the story of Man’s self-division, suffering, and final accession to a harmonious and integrated existence. At the End of History, man is to be able to express his real self and fulfill what Romantic philosophy believed the human subject should be. In the Romantic tradition, against which the Marxist notion of the subject should be seen, the essence of the subject was meaningful self-expression. Charles Taylor shows that in the Romantic view the realization of the subject’s essence was the subject’s self-realization



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“so that what he defines himself in relation to is something which unfolds from himself.” The conscious man, in Romanticism, achieves his highest point “when he recognizes his own life as an adequate, true expression of what he potentially is.”⁸ Following both the Romantic tradition and Hegel, Marx believed that man expresses himself through “labor.” Marx appropriated the Hegelian concept of labor as the externalization and the becoming-for-himself of Man (that is, his self-realization) and conceived the possibility of an authentic existence of the human subject, compatible with a nature expressed through a worldmodifying activity. Labor, in Marx, should be understood not in its narrow sense as a description of human economic practice but as the expression of the human essence and the foundation of human existence. Marx did not see labor as one human activity among others; rather, labor was “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities which a human being exercises whenever he produces,”⁹ that in which every single activity is founded and to which all activities return. For Marx, thus, the term “labor” meant an original, foundational unity of work and thought and not just the practical activity of working, divorced from all thought.¹⁰ When true to himself, the human being, according to Marx, was a laborer. The assertion of the primordial unity of working and thinking faculties in labor went back to Capital where he sketched out the peculiarity of the labor of the human species: We have to consider labor in a form peculiar to the human species. A spider carries on operations resembling those of the weaver; and many human architects are put to shame by the skill with which a bee constructs her cell. But what from the very first distinguishes the most incompetent architect from the best of bees, is that the architect has built a cell in his head before he constructs it in wax. The labor process ends in the creation of something which, when the process began, already existed in the worker’s imagination, already existed in an ideal form. What happens is, not merely that the worker brings about a change of form in material objects, at the same time, in the nature that exists apart from himself, he realizes his own purpose.¹¹

According to Marx, Man is unique in that his labor is expressive; it unites activity and thought. But such a man was the ideal man, not the real man. Man’s original unity was suspended until history ended and Communism was attained. Marx contrasted the Romantic ideal of the united, self-expressive man with man’s actual predicament. In actuality, Marx argued, man is 

Marxism as Eschatology

divided against himself. In his work, the human producer “does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. His work is external to his being. He does not affirm, he negates himself in his work.”¹² The work of the historical man, Marx tells us, is a far cry from authentic human labor. This defining activity of the expressivist self was historically a mere tool. Man and his labor could not reach their fullest expression as long as the object of man’s labor was not an object of his own choice. The split within human agency and the separation between thought and work, between intention and the activity that realizes it, were at the root of what Marx refers to as human alienation. These “antinomies,” “inversions,” and “contradictions” of the human condition ensured that man could not become an integrated laborer; they turned him into an “appendage” of the means of production, a “fragment” of his true self.¹³ It was History—the story of the exploitation of man by man—that alienated the worker from himself. In history the goal of man’s work was forced upon him externally. History gave birth to the master (Hegel) or the exploiter (Marx) who forced the human producer to objectify ideas not his own. Man’s expressive unity was lost when human society broke down into classes. Since this was the opening event in history, it was construed as a colossal calamity. The debt to the Christian notion of the Fall from Grace is evident here. Engels’s canonical On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State provides support for a reading of the Marxist notion of “the exit from the pastoral and early agricultural stages of culture” in terms of the Christian narrative. This catastrophic event introduced “an epoch, lasting until today, in which everything engendered by civilization is double-sided, doubletongued, self-contradictory, antagonistic. . . . Every advance in production, each new emancipation of one class always means a new oppression of another class.” Engels was, of course, talking about the so-called Original Expropriation, which, in Marx’s own words, “means nothing but a series of historical processes, [resulting] in a decomposition of the original union existing between the laboring Man and his means of labor.” The division of the communal into private property, unequally owned, destroyed the paradisal, universal equality. The loss of human integrity and the onset of exploitation introduced evil into the world of man. “Exploitation,” writes Löwith, “is an 

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ethical judgment, the radical evil of ‘pre-history’ or, in biblical terms, original sin.” Leonard Wessell also believes that this ethical mythodrama provides the foundation for the scientific edifice of Marxism: “The Christian view of history as the struggle between Good and Evil is secularized in so far as the economic opposition between oppressors and oppressed, between exploiters and exploited, brings about the historical movement. Exploitation is the original sin.”¹⁴ Both the Fall and the Original Expropriation were unique events with universal ramifications because they took their meaning from the conception of history as a single, worldwide, unified process. The early Christian ecumenical idea, the view of the inhabited world as a totality, inaugurated a break with the particularist principle of the Greek city-state.¹⁵ In the Middle Ages the idea took the form of a universal state and universal church. Later on, it passed into the Hegelian demonstration that national histories were only moments of a larger universal history. With the spread of Christian monotheism, the belief in a plurality of partisan divinities with their respective constituencies was replaced by a belief in a single God, who does not discriminate among people and potentially extends his grace to any human being. This does not mean that everyone was to be saved, only that anyone might be. The Marxist conviction that the entire world was headed toward unity in Communism reflected the structure of the Christian universalist teaching that humankind was one. Christian ecumenism reappeared in Marx’s proletariat, a human group that transcended ethnic, national, or gender boundaries and was thus fit to act as a universalist messiah. According to Marx, “since Communism presupposes the universal development of productive forces, the proletariat can thus exist only world-historically, just as Communism, the movement of the proletariat, can only have a ‘world-historical’ existence.”¹⁶ Marxism was a doctrine of deliverance, promising a perfect society in the future in which man escapes from a dependence on economics to defeat the irrational forces that hold him in slavery. “The rhythms of the development of Marxist economic categories are,” as a perceptive student of Marx realized, “simultaneously the rhythms of a salvational drama. Social and economic categories are not the theoretical bedrock of Marx’s thinking: rather they receive their intelligibility from the mytho-religious story they relate.” This story was the story of the human loss of self and regainment of self. Marx promised his disciples that the realm of freedom would be ushered in 

Marxism as Eschatology

by a “fundamental revolution in the mode of production [which] should restore the original union in a new historical form.”¹⁷ In the view of Earnest Tuveson, the Communist Manifesto is “a scenario for the drama of millenarian redemption.” Even as it discards ancient Christian symbolism to speak in terms proper to the modern age, this canonic text “trumpets forth the old certainty that ‘the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles,’ but the historical process is to produce the Armageddon.”¹⁸ The evils of industrialism were given by Marx a millenarian interpretation as the harbingers of a final, universal judgment. That they were the worst of all evils seen by humanity was regarded as proof that, as in the Book of Revelations, the ultimate reversal was being prepared. This reversal gave meaning to History, which was seen as depending on a reality that lay beyond it. The real, universal meaning of History was to be fully expressed only at the End. In Christianity, God manifested Himself not only in cosmic time but also in historic time. Mircea Eliade observes that such time was irreversible. “Since God was incarnated, that is, since he took on an historically conditioned human existence, history acquired the possibility of being sanctified.”¹⁹ History was revealed as a crucial dimension of God’s presence in the world. Thus it was not so much the course of history as its end that was at one with the essence of God. As Pannenberg put it: “But insofar as the end presupposes the course of history, because it is the perfection of it, so does the course of history belong in essence to the revelation of God, for history receives its unity from its goal.”²⁰ This conception was secularized by Hegel. Hegel’s maxim “the History of the world is the world’s court of justice” was, as Löwith says, “as religious in its original motivation . . . as it is irreligious in its secular application, where it means that the judgment is contained in the historical process as such.”²¹ In other words, history could be judged only when it was over, when it could be regarded from the vantage point of the End of History as a self-contained whole. The Revolution was seen as the mythical final event destined to reverse the course of history, designed to express the telos within history, the drive toward the resolution of class conflicts. The Marxist notion of Revolution was reminiscent of the Apocalypse insofar as it suggested that history was to result in an abrupt and total transformation of the conditions of mankind into a perfect and felicitous state. In the words of Meyer Abrams, the Revolution— just like the Apocalypse—was conceived of as inevitable, “because compelled 

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by iron laws or by dialectical theology, operative within the historical process itself; abrupt and relatively imminent.” It was to be brought about “through the radical and irreconcilable opposition between economic classes, in which one side (fated to prevail) embodies the historical right and good and its opponent (fated to be defeated and annihilated) embodies historical wrong and evil.” Abrams shows, furthermore, that Marx predicted the Revolution to be violent, “because destined to be achieved by a fierce but purifying destruction of the forces of historical evil, absolute, in that instead of gradual improvement or reform, there will be a rapid transformation of the very foundation of society” and, finally, universal, because it was destined to encompass the entire globe.²² Revolution stood out as an event of a peculiar order. Since it organized History to give the events within it meaning, it could not belong to the same order of events. Whereas in one sense, Revolution was to be a mundane historical event, the last one in a series of mundane events, in another sense it was not to be an event in history at all but an event of a metahistorical character. Marx described Revolution as an event that was to remove humanity from its historical conditions (sometimes termed “pre-history”) and render Man a free and integrated being at last. The Revolution was thus not one more event with its own peculiarities (all events are peculiar in one sense or another) but the consummation of the entire series of events. What was to be unique about the Revolution was not just that no further event was to follow it, but that no other event need follow it, because in the Revolution the whole purpose of History was to be fulfilled. The Revolution was not an event arbitrarily said to deny the occurrence of all conceivable subsequent events. It was rather that nothing more could have happened in history, because the eternal meaning that gave reality to History was to have exhausted itself.²³ The Revolution was an event that constituted history by fixing its interpretive asymptote. As such it both was and was not a historical event comparable with other historical events. To avoid the natural semiotic phrasing that would trivialize history, divesting it of its meaning (Marxists vehemently resist such trivializations of their prophecy as the remark that “nothing is new under the sun”), the “Revolution” had to be kept out of language—to remain outside a semiotics that would have insisted on the equality of every individual unit (event) in the linguistic series. To preclude trivialization, the term “Revolution” operated not as a sign but as a symbol. Romantic symbolism, utilized by Marx, introduced the grammar of the 

Marxism as Eschatology

future anterior tense into the Marxist language, mediating the ahistoricism of the final event of History and historicism. Marx conceived the New Man as a promise of the beyond, a subject-to-be that seeks realization. More specifically (and I shall expand on this in the following chapters), he posited a messiah of the proletariat-intelligentsia as the agent mediating between the historical present and the metahistorical beyond. To assume that this messiah already existed—that is, to read Marxist statements regarding the proletariat or the intelligentsia literally, as if they were describing an already extant reality—was to fail to understand the gap Marxists perceived between the world as it was and the world as it ought to have been. The proletariat and the intelligentsia were symbols, not social constituencies. The symbolic dimension of the Marxist language revealed the future orientation of the message, the quest of the class-messiah for self-realization. Alert to the tension between the real and the symbolic in eschatological thinking, C. H. Dodds points out that, when modern apocalyptists set forth the shape of things to come, their imaginative skill was used to produce a “fictitious narrative,” which appeared so much like the history we know that “we forget it had no close relation to actuality. We are dealing with symbol and not with actuality. The time-scale is irrelevant to that which has never received embodiment in time and space and therefore has no existence in the temporal order.”²⁴ To confuse mytho-history with mundane history is tempting, but ultimately very misleading.²⁵ Marx carefully distinguished revolutions as events within history from Revolution as an Apocalypse that was to terminate history. “In all revolutions up to now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, whilst the Communist Revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labor, and abolishes the rule of classes with the classes themselves.” Ultimate and irrevocable, the Revolution was to transform humanity completely, create the New Man, and thereby ensure that the old order could not return. In this sense, the Revolution was to be both end and beginning. What followed (to cite Dodds who speaks of the Apocalypse, the Christian corollary of the Revolution) was not to be thought of as a “kind of Nirvana or holy nothingness, in which the illusions of the time-process are finally laid to rest.”²⁶ On the contrary, the values implicit in History were to be fully affirmed in a sublimated form once the Revolution had taken place. The Revolution 

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was to bring with it new heavens and a new earth, and to transform human nature into the likeness of the true laborer, as Marx conceived of him. Marx quite explicitly stated that the Revolution “would bring to a close the prehistory of human society. History as man’s protracted ‘act of becoming’ would give way in post-History to man’s being.”²⁷ History suppressed the romantic, expressive self but did not destroy it. The New Man would spread his wings after the Revolution. Relating the Final Event to the past course of events and to the tendencies of the present, Marx strenuously endeavored to link Revolution with everyday meanings as well. He posited an endless chain of revolutions, immanent to History, that prefigured and symbolized the final Revolution, and he tended to read the myriad of mundane historical events as either echoes of the Original Expropriation (an example of this tendency is the theory of capitalist primary accumulation dispossessing the peasantry, a clear parallel to the original dispossession of the primeval producer) or as the prefiguration of the ultimate emancipation (for example, the theory of minirevolutions that move the wheels of history and advance humanity to an ever superior mode of production foreshadowing the final Revolution). A similar conception of history prompted Christians to break up the procession of events in history into three (or seven) ages. The cataclysmic events that terminated one age and introduced the next were thought of as symbols of the Apocalypse, which was to terminate history and finally inaugurate the kingdom of heaven. The Christian and the Marxist exegesis issued from the reading of history as a linear process, which progressed through similarly structured circles, the earlier ones prefiguring the later more advanced ones. Christian exegetes took as their guiding principle the idea that the events and personages of the Old Testament were “types” prefiguring and anticipating the events and personages of the New Testament. The typologist assumed that “the same unwavering plan could be discerned in the sacred story, the earlier stages being shadows or, to vary the metaphor, rough preliminary sketches of the latter.”²⁸ Similarly schooled, Marxist typologists established historic parallels between various historical periods. They tended, for example, to focus on the uniformity of the process by which the various modes of production ascend and decline. Marxist typologists also sought to establish historico-geographical equivalents and suggest to the “less advanced” countries or regions that they study and repeat the programs of “more advanced” ones.²⁹ A typological 

Marxism as Eschatology

approach was at the root of the prevalent use of last names as nouns in the Marxist discourse, “our Cromwells,” “our Dantons,” “our Babels,” for example. Such a turn of phrase underscored the belief that historical figures were not concrete unique human actors but instruments that occupied the role history had assigned them. Since similar agencies were believed to be engendered by similar stages in the evolution of modes of production, historical agents lost their uniqueness and their names became types. Making a similar point with regard to Christian typology, Löwith argues that “the significance of Tiberius and Augustus, of Herod and Pontius Pilate, is determined not by their positions and actions but by their function within the divine purpose.”³⁰ The objective of the Marxist typological analysis was to show that past and present political history, without being an actual salvational history (which, strictly speaking, included only the history of the revolutionary movement), was linked with salvational history. As the pagan rulers indirectly became “instruments of the divine plan of salvation, either as unconscious scourges of Yahweh, as in the early prophets, or as unconscious mediators of salvation, as Cyrus in Deutero-Isaiah,” so did Spartacus become the forerunner of Lenin and the counterrevolutionary Kornilov the inadvertent inciter of Russian proletarian consciousness.³¹ While the unfolding of time before the Revolution was unidirectional, its progression entailed vicissitudes, even temporary setbacks, the so-called periods of reaction. Marxism thereby allowed a degree of contingency in history. If the plan of history determined in advance the course of events, in every detail, the events themselves could not have been described as truly significant and revelatory. The plan, the outline of the Marxist historical narrative, would then have been everything, whereas contingency, generally regarded as the constitutive feature of all history, would have been reduced to nothingness. In the course of salvation, Cullmann writes, history, “the divine plan, as it was revealed through earlier events and interpretations, is clarified by later unforeseen ones, is set into a new perspective, and transformed in its presentation. Thus we see the way in which constant and contingency go together in the prediction of salvation.”³² Eschatological thinking saw the forces of evil as the source of contingency in history. Identified with the agencies that resisted salvation/emancipation, evil had a dual role: on the one hand, it was an historical obstacle, the very force that slowed salvation down; on the other hand, it was the very condition that made salvation possible. The very notion of salvation assumed moral 

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humanity—the active choice of the good, which in turn allowed for the possibility of the evil choice. Morality and good could constitute themselves only against the background of immorality and evil. Communism was to be achieved when enough disciples of Marx chose to embrace it and to reject the evils of class society—not when a mechanistic, blind process had run its course. Evil had a direct impact on the structure of Marxist history, which was propelled by revolutions, not evolutions, because the machinations of counterrevolutionary reactionaries (the Marxist evil) ensured there could be no seamless historical development.³³ Although the Marxist notion of historical time was deterministic, it was different from the linear, positivist concept that depicted historical time as an incremental progression. The final showdown between the exploiters and the exploited, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, corresponded to the Judeo-Christian belief in a final battle between Christ and the Antichrist in the concluding epoch of history.³⁴ The words of the “Internationale” capture the millenarian character of the last events in Marxism: Arise ye workers from your slumbers Arise ye prisoners of want For reason in revolt now thunders And at last ends the age of cant . . . So comrades, come rally And the last fight let us face.”³⁵

Stalin proclaimed that the opposition to Communism was growing at the same rate as Communism itself, and that it was during the final events that the conflict between good and evil was to reach a climax. In the s he repeatedly asserted that class struggle was intensifying with every step the Soviet Union took toward Communism. Communism, Stalin said, would be realized only after the conclusive confrontation between the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat.³⁶

Salvation Through Knowledge The interpretation of Marxism as a secularized eschatology is open to critique. Marxism conceived of the Revolution as an act of man. In Christianity, on the other hand, the Apocalypse and the End of History lay outside the power of human agency. The Christians believed that “the day of the Lord 

Marxism as Eschatology

will come as a thief in the night” ( Peter :), that is, the Apocalypse will arrive unexpected, unannounced. “Watch therefore; for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (Matthew :). This position, so the critical argument has it, is incommensurable with Marxism, which rejects all fatalism and calls on man to participate in salvation.³⁷ Hans Blumenberg is the main proponent of this challenge to an eschatological reading of Marxism. According to Blumenberg, the assumption that the moment they are living is their very last allows Christians “to place demands on every individual that are inconsistent with the realism regarding the world.”³⁸ Not so modern man, who does not dismiss the historical present in the name of an imminent beyond but strives to understand the meaning of the present by locating it in the progression of universal historical evolution and so to hasten the transition from the evil of the present to the perfection of the future. In a similar vein, Hayden White argues that Marxists, unlike Christians, are “anti-utopian” insofar as they believe that “history is not a sublime spectacle but a comprehensible process the various parts, stages, epochs, and even individual events of which are transparent to a consciousness able to make sense of it.” White builds on Blumenberg’s thesis asserting that religious appeal differs substantially from the appeal of secular ideologies such as Marxism, which seek “to justify the obligations they lay upon their devotees by virtue of their claim to have divined the pattern, plan, or meaning of the historical process endured by a humanity neither inherently corrupt nor fallen from grace but simply unenlightened.”³⁹ Below, I take issue with Blumenberg and those aspects of his richly elaborated critique of the secularization thesis that are relevant to my view of Marxism as embedded in eschatology. But before I do, I should point out that White’s more cursory criticism of the secularization thesis ignores two significant aspects of the issue. First, in arguing that Marx viewed man not in terms of good and evil but only in terms of enlightenment and ignorance, White ignores Marx’s reading of human history as a moral drama in which the good (the exploited) vanquish the wicked (the exploiters) and establish the realm of justice. Second (and more important), Marxism’s ascription of historical agency to man and his intellect, instead of to God and his divine discretion, is not sufficient grounds to argue for a radical distinction between Marxist and Christian views of salvation. The core of my argument is that the Marxist elevation of the knowledge of man (or more precisely, of his 

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self-consciousness) to the status of the vehicle of salvation is inspired by an ancient tradition. Tracing this emphasis on knowledge to its roots in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, I show that these traditions were preserved in the thought of at least some Christian theologians, that they also have inspired the secular philosophies of Hegel and Marx. The conviction that a pure society could be attained through knowledge of God—or in the secularized Marxist rendition, that the classless society could be attained through knowledge of history—provided the bridge between Christian and Marxist views of human agency in history. Marx’s return to the Neoplatonic and the Gnostic Christian traditions led him to ascribe to humans the ability to affect the course of history, provided they came to comprehend its meaning. A sharp contrast between Christian eschatology and the Marxist philosophy of history, between a passive view of man and a dynamic view of man as a master of his own fate, appears to me therefore to be an oversimplification. In fact, Marxism and at least a certain strain in the Christian tradition (immanent God theology and Christian messianism, which were fused in Marxist scientific messianism) were similarly informed by the concept of a historical process that stands above man yet is not entirely immune to the intervention of man. Numerous scholars have shown that the valuation of knowledge in Western thought seems to have grown out of pre-Christian traditions, which granted to knowledge the power to return the fallen soul to its original pure state. Both Meyer Abrams and Leszek Kolakowski, for example, sought the origins of the Marxist quest for historical salvation in Neoplatonism. The monistic philosophy of Plotinus held that the first principle is the One or the Good. Plotinus understood absolute unity as both the origin and the supreme mode of all existence; for him unity was also the measure of all value. “All that proceeds from any principle and reverts upon it has a cyclic activity. For it reverts upon that principle whence it proceeds, it links its end to its beginning, and the movement is one and continuous.”⁴⁰ This legacy inspired the belief that the world—the realm of the plural and the deficient—had to be recognized as the alienated manifestation of man, the singular One. The Neoplatonists philosophically articulated a mythopoetic longing for true knowledge, alone able to return unity to the One. According to them the human improved himself upon entering into intimate cognitive contact with the object, which was nothing else but his alienated self. For them, the soul’s urge to liberate itself from contingency entailed overcoming the alienation between the soul and its object. Men who rediscovered them

Marxism as Eschatology

selves made the world their own again and came to terms with reality. What this urge of the soul suggested was an original unity that had degenerated.⁴¹ This idea of division in what had once been whole in man can be traced all the way back to the Orphic tradition that influenced Plato and the Neoplatonists. In this tradition, the fate of the soul was decided by a disastrous occurrence at the primeval beginning: the soul had been incarcerated within the human body as punishment. Only self-knowledge could extricate the soul from its prison of suffering in the corporeal world.⁴² The “promise of gnosis” becomes, for Paul Ricoeur, the Platonic philosophical tradition: The Orphics, says Plato, named the body; in naming the body, they named the soul. Now, the act in which man perceives himself as soul, or, better, makes the alternation of life and death,—this purifying act par excellence is knowledge. In this awareness, in this awakening to itself of the exiled soul, all “philosophy” of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic type is contained. If the body is desire and passion, the soul is the origin and principle of any withdrawal, of any attempt to put a distance between the logos on the one hand and the body, on the other. . . . Withdrawal of the soul, reunion of the soul with the divine—there we have the philosophical intention.

Ricoeur calls this type of eschatology salvation through knowledge. For happiness “is the ‘good soul,’ and the ‘good soul’ comes to a man when he ‘knows’; when knowledge is the ‘strongest’ and desire the weakest.” Ricoeur relates these motives to the Christian tradition and argues that “the myth of the exiled soul” provides the symbolic structure for the story of the Fall of Adam.⁴³ Surviving in Christianity, Platonic ideas reconciled the scheme of Plotinus with the historical metanarrative of Paradise–Fall–Paradise Regained. God the Father became an impersonal first principle, or the Absolute. Evil and separation from unity became the primal sin. The striving for self-sufficiency of fragments that splinter from the One was identified with Adam’s attempt to wrest independence from God (what Christians designate as a desire for “flesh”); the reabsorption of those fragments into the One became the unification with the (divine) Spirit. Origen injected Neoplatonism into the Christian idea of the consummation of history by linking the Apocalypse with Genesis. He interpreted “the end or consummation” of all things as a return to their primal unity, “for the end is always like the beginning.”⁴⁴ When thus transported into Christian history, the Neoplatonic circle was invested with a specific historical beginning and an end. The Platonic eternal 

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circulation became a single circle.⁴⁵ The Platonically intellectualized “Good” acquired a distinctly Judeo-Christian moral value when Plotinus’s scheme depicting the descent from the One and reascent toward the One was interpreted as a move from good to evil and back to good. Especially significant is that Neoplatonic Christian theologians remained loyal to the idea that knowledge has a salvational quality. Paradoxical as this may seem, given man’s fall upon tasting of the tree of knowledge, Neoplatonic Christianity thought of redeemed humanity as the embodiment of knowledge—self-knowledge and the knowledge of God alike. In the eschatological imagination of Origen, for example, the saved exult in full knowledge: “When they reach heaven . . . God will disclose the cause of phenomena to the redeemed. . . . Freed from all shackles . . . the partial knowledge we have enjoyed hitherto will give place to a more blinding gnosis. No longer bodies, nor even perhaps souls but pure intelligences, they will contemplate rational and intelligible substances face to face.”⁴⁶ Thus Neoplatonized, Christians venerated the selfknowledge of man both as a vehicle of salvation and as a quality of man in paradise regained. Gnosticism has also received attention from notable scholars, who have drawn parallels between Gnosticism and Marxism in their shared emphasis on the salvational qualities of knowledge. In what Hans Jonas called the “Syrian-Egyptian type of Gnosis,” man’s gradual decline from unity with the highest deity was seen to be the origin of evil and darkness. The earthly world and the powers that held the world in thrall came into being as a result of a breach in the kingdom of light. Here evil, as in the Marxist tradition, was not a preexistent principle but a “darkened level of being.” In this type of gnosis the world, like class society in Marx, was the product of a cosmic tragedy, a terrible predicament in which man was entangled and from which he had to be set free. The goal of Gnosticism was to release the “Inner Man” from this bondage and bring him back to his native realm of light. The necessary condition for this was that man came to understand the transmundane God and his own true nature. Man had to grasp his divine origin as well as his present fallen situation, and so come to see the nature of the world that held him captive. As a famous Valentinian Gnostic formula had it: “What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth is.”⁴⁷ This knowledge, however, was withheld from man by his very situation since “ignorance” was the essence of mundane existence, just as it was the 

Marxism as Eschatology

principle of the world’s origins. Gnostic knowledge extended the basic notion of the divine nature of man into a narrative of his origin and destiny, and then into a complete theory of the driving forces of cosmic history. Man had to recognize both the divine spark in himself and the link between his soul and the divine element if he was to achieve salvation. Similarly, Marx extrapolated a universal history from his conviction that once upon a time man had been an integrated producer and that man would return to this state of bliss once he had overcome his present alienation. In his influential essay, “Marxism and Gnosis,” Ernst Topitsch follows the evolution of the Gnostic myth of the fall and of the blindness of the spirit deceived by mundane powers.⁴⁸ Topitsch locates traces of the myth in the Hegelian philosophy of the self-alienation of the Absolute Spirit and ultimately concludes that the Marxist myth of the alienation of man and his emancipation through the exercise of Marxist salvational theory repeated the structure of the Gnostic historical myth. Always seen as that part of man that was superior to the oppressive environment, the “soul” was what man has to strive for if he was to regain his original condition. In Gnosticism, the pneuma is the life principle that penetrates man from without and transforms him into a pneumatized or spiritual creature. A community of the saved is formed, a race of those who have seen the light— the “pneumatics” in the language of Gnosticism. In Marx’s writing the proletariat, the class savior, in order to represent the social totality, had to possess that “breath of spirit which identifies itself with the spirit of the people [Volksseele] and inspires [begeistert] material power toward political power.”⁴⁹ In order to explain “scientifically” and “materialistically” the dynamics of emancipation Marx, remarkably, was compelled to invoke the ancient idea of the pneuma. Another powerful Gnostic influence apparent in Marxism is the denigration of value-free curiosity and the valuation of reflection. We will see in the next chapter that the key contrast between the Marxist intelligentsia (the bearer of the salvational message) and the bourgeois intellectuals (who study the world for its own sake) is incomprehensible outside this crucial distinction between two kinds of knowledge. Scholars have pointed out that, in Gnosticism, knowledge—above and beyond a cognitive procedure of the intellect alone—formed the experience of spiritual regeneration. “To know, in fact, is to know one’s own origin, who one truly was at the beginning. And to know one’s own arche (beginning) is also to know one’s own telos or end.”⁵⁰ In this connection Elaine Pagels points out that the word “gnosis” is 

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“often translated ‘knowledge,’ but the translation is somewhat misleading, since gnosis differs from intellectual knowledge which is characterized in Greek by the word eidein” (from which derives the English “idea”). Since Gnosis is restricted to the knowledge of personal relationship (as in “We know Christ” or, in the words of the Delphi oracle, “Know thyself ”), Pagels notes that the term might better be translated as “insight,” or “wisdom.” One Gnostic teacher encouraged his disciples to seek gnosis within themselves: “Abandon the search for God, and creation, and similar things of that kind. Instead, take yourself as the starting place. Ask who is within you. . . . If you carefully examine [yourself ] you will find [God] in yourself.” Pagels summarizes that “the secret of gnosis is that when one comes to know oneself at the deepest level, one comes to know God as the source of one’s being.”⁵¹ The Gnostics were not interested in knowledge that did not have a liberating effect. The Gnostic knowledge combined the object of knowledge (the divine nature), the means of knowledge (the redeeming gnosis), and the knower himself. Gnosticism has also received attention from notable scholars who have drawn parallels between Gnosticism and Marxism.⁵² For Marx as well, true knowledge was the knowledge of the pure origins of man, his present fallen state, and the potential for regeneration. Having criticized the alienation of man’s creative qualities in alienating and objectifying work, according to Hyppolite, Marx, in striking solidarity with Gnosticism, “equally opposed the alienation of man through an objective scientism which fails to perceive science as the creation of man.” Whereas scientism explains man in terms of nature, Marx argued that “nature cannot be detached from its human significance.”⁵³ Even the Marxist notion of the superiority of the point of return compared with the point of departure has a Gnostic origin. Although the end of the human itinerary was to coincide with the restoration of the original spiritual self, Gnostic thought did not see the time span of the human journey to salvation as meaningless. Salvation, according to the Gnostics, was measured by “moments of revelation, whose reassuring succession directs the Gnostic to a safe landing. . . . Rather than eliminate time and break this continuous line enveloping them with its threatening silence, Gnostics must learn to understand what is really happening behind the temporal organism.” Thrown into the material world, man was not to return to his starting point quite the same. “Gnostic nostalgia for origins is not satisfied by the 

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simple return to the original Paradise. . . . In its trials of exile, crossing the frightful threshold of evil, experiencing and suffering the pangs of spiritual birth, the Gnostic Church matures individually and collectively.”⁵⁴ This is of major importance because the idea that at the beginning of history man was naive and unaware of himself and at the end of time man regained himself in a self-conscious state was adopted by Christianity and transmitted to Marx. The Fall and the subsequent development of consciousness leading up to salvation served a purpose, and so the course of human history was granted meaning. Although the belief that man was destined to return to himself implied a cyclical view of history, man’s improved state at the point of arrival was the justification for the emphasis on the linear aspect of the historical process. As Topitsch and Abrams show, the Romantics developed these Gnostic ideas, shifting the location of the highest truth from the undifferentiated unity of the beginning to the compounded end of an extended historical process. “I posit God as the first and the last, the Alpha and Omega, but as Alpha he is not what he is as Omega,” declared Friedrich Schelling. “For at the beginning he is merely ‘Deus implicitus’ and only as Omega is he ‘Deus explicitus.’ ” What is crucial here is that the Romantics transformed emanation into evolution, and so converted Plotinus’s unfavorable account of the decline from original unity to praise for an indispensable stage in the reascent toward a higher perfection. Hegel, who shared this ideal, stated unequivocally that “the return to the beginning is also an advance.”⁵⁵ Finally, Engels appropriated the “return as advance” idea for Marxism, explaining that, although the Revolution was to bring humanity back to a classless state, this did not mean that the Revolution could achieve its goals by simply reinstating man in his savage condition. “Among savages and semi-savages there likewise often exist no class distinctions, and every people has passed through such a state. It could not occur to us to re-establish such a state for the simple reason that . . . only at a very high level . . . does it become possible to raise production to such an extent that the abolition of class distinctions can be a real progress.”⁵⁶ To account for the tension between the cyclical and linear elements in history, Romantic philosophers as well as Hegel and Marx came to describe historical development as a spiral: “All process departs from an undifferentiated unity into sequential self-divisions, to close in an organized unity which has a much higher status than the original unity because it incorporates all the intervening divisions and oppositions.”⁵⁷ 

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When discussing the ancient antecedents of Marxism we must consider not only the notion of subject but also the notion of the world. In Gnosticism the mundane, the worldly, was evil and irredeemable. Knowledge therefore took the subject into a union with a reality that lay outside the world. According to Hans Jonas, “in the three term configuration,—man, world, God—man and God belong together in contraposition to the world, but are, in spite of this essential belonging together, in fact separated precisely by the world.”⁵⁸ The Platonic view was somewhat different. Whereas knowledge of the forms was to take the subject into a union within a domain that transcended the bodily and the realm of appearances, it was to do so only to a limited extent. The body might be secondary and deceptive but it was not exactly nothing. According to Plato, as the subject gained knowledge he became aware of the idea that underlay and informed outward appearances, thus fusing with the world’s essence. Gnosticism was fundamentally different from Platonism in that it closed itself off from the world, from how things appeared to the subject, from the sensual pleasures that figure so prominently in Plato’s Symposium, for example. Aristotle, who had an unbounded interest in nature and who maintained that perception was in itself pleasurable, could not have been the foremost student of a Gnostic. Whatever else one might say about the influence of Greek thought on Hegel, it was this amor mundi that found its way into the Hegelian conception of the world as a structure suffused with Spirit. As for Marx, he declared that “nothing worldly is alien to us,” but at the same time he forbade man to unite with the world, just as he was exhorting man to change the world. Marx seemingly oscillated between Platonism and Gnosticism, between a rejection of curiosity for the world, on one hand, and a world-directed scientific interest on the other. (Of course, the whole point for Marx was that scientific interest had always to reflect the quest for emancipation and, in that sense, have a transcendent motivation.) In some places Marx urged humanity to unite with the world. He believed that Communism would accomplish the union of man with nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature. Elsewhere, however, he asserted that evil could be overcome only through bringing nature under the control of man so that freedom beyond nature can unfold. Marx embraced nature, not as a beautiful and enchanting thing, as the Romantics held, but as dead matter to be appropriated and radically changed by humans, who were to put it to 

Marxism as Eschatology

use in their project of emancipation. Unlike the Gnostics, however, Marx believed that emancipation could be achieved only in this world. The Gnostic dualistic belief that the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness existed from the very beginning and were brought into contact, only accidentally, thereby setting in motion the baleful history of the world, was foreign to Marx, who postulated an original unity of human society. For the Gnostics, man’s alienation from the world had to be deepened if the inner self was to be fully realized. “In the Gnostic view, since the cosmos is contrary to life and spirit, the knowledge as savior cannot aim at integration into the cosmic whole.”⁵⁹ For Marx, whose monism was closer to Platonism than to Gnosticism, man was immanent to nature, not transcendent. Marx would have been able to articulate neither his view of the historical process as immanent nor his critique of “utopian otherworldliness” if not for the efforts of his predecessors to answer the challenge of Gnostic dualism and bridge the evil present and the good future. Interesting as the differences between the Gnostic and Marxist cosmologies might be, they have a limited significance in the present context. The Marxists’ critical attitude to the capitalist world harked back to Gnostic nihilism. Philosophical criticism, Marx argued, has to be followed to its final conclusions: “we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of the ruthless criticism of everything existing.”⁶⁰ The statements of Marx that seem most typically Gnostic in their iconoclasm permit us to challenge one of Blumenberg’s central theses, namely that modernity represented the overcoming of Gnosticism. Rather than rejecting Gnostic nihilism, Marxism embraced many of its aspects. The revolutionary wanted nothing to do with the existing structures of society. Instead, he participated in a sort of sect that aimed at the total destruction of the existing society, which saw itself as a precursor of the paradise to come. Topitsch establishes that the Marxist equivalents of the Gnostic elect were the proletarians, whose secret lore was a tale of struggle against the false consciousness of the uninitiated.⁶¹ The Revolution, in Marx’s vision, was to leave nothing of the world standing that humanity had until then endured. Such radicalism has allowed Eric Voegelin to describe Marx as a “modern Gnostic intellectual.” Marx, in this account, was dissatisfied with his situation, believed all problems stemmed from the wickedness of the world, thought that salvation was 

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possible and that human action could bring about a change in the order of things, and, finally, contended that it was possible to perfect the order of things. The preservation of Gnostic attitudes explains why Marx sought “the knowledge—gnosis—of a formula for self and world salvation” and why Marx was ready “to come forward as a prophet to proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind.”⁶² In Marxism the awakening of humanity was to radically change its character. A regained self-awareness was to introduce a New Man into history and thereby unleash the world Revolution. In Gnostic terms, the New Man was the “spiritual man,” the man who was free again. According to Voegelin, Marx employed a dualistic ontology that was essentially Gnostic. Any form of dualism, he claims, is revolutionary in principle, because dualism places all value on what is believed is higher reality, the reality of the future.”⁶³ Voegelin probably exaggerates Marxist nihilism, however. Whereas the Gnostics believed that liberation would occur when the world was transcended, Marx claimed that the Revolution was a predetermined component of the history of the world itself.⁶⁴ Salvaging the meaning of the mundane history of the world was very important to Marxism. This imperative brought Marx closer to the Christian tradition in two respects. First, Christians obviously could not condemn the world outright since they saw the world as God’s creation and its present condition as the outcome of God’s providence. (Gnostics solve that problem by postulating two Gods—the evil demiurge in this world and the good God of the beyond.) It was from Christianity that Marx inherited the belief that the wicked alienated world we live in is an indispensable springboard to the better world to come. Second, the End of History, as Marx saw it, resonated not only with the Gnostic belief in the sudden reversal and the regeneration of man but also with the Christian belief in the divinely prepared Apocalypse. Once we realize that the apocalyptic and the Gnostic views of history were compatible insofar as they shared an emphasis on the acquisition (by revelation) and the communication of a knowledge that was both future oriented and exercising salvational powers, we have discovered the foundation of the Marxist ability to yoke together Gnostic revolutionary activism and the idle Christian expectation of a divine Apocalypse.⁶⁵ The core of my argument here is that the synthesis of the Gnostic and the Christian traditions accounts for the coexistence in Marxist eschatology of an unwavering belief in a predetermined End of History, a notion that inspired a certain passivity, alongside a belief in the world-changing capacity 

Marxism as Eschatology

of consciousness that encouraged human self-reliance and a voluntarist notion of action. The Revolution was impossible without consciousness, and consciousness was impossible before world history arrived at a certain stage of maturity.

Salvational Knowledge Between Augustine and Hegel Most Christians denied human agency its Gnostic status as a catalyst of salvation. In the vociferously anti-Gnostic Augustinian tradition, God was omnipotent and man depended for salvation on divine benevolence alone. Augustine informed the believer that apocalyptic prophecies were “not to be read as referring to any particular historical catastrophe, but to the final winding up of all history; and the time of that no man can know.”⁶⁶ The traditional interpretation of Christianity as anti-intellectual has to be challenged if Marxism is to be seen as a secularized Christian eschatology. The transformation of the Greek concept of moral action in the thought of Augustine was responsible for the denigration of knowledge throughout much of the Christian tradition. Greek ethics was intellectualist. In Plato’s philosophy, immoral actions were essentially understood as the result of yielding to unreflective human appetites. The Greek moral man aspired to supreme rationality. This helps us understand Epictetus when he tells us that “to become good we must first learn something, . . . that there is a God and that we can be like him.” In Augustine’s view, it would have been blasphemous to urge man to emulate God because the moral obligation of humanity was not to issue moral imperatives but to follow them. God, not man, was pronounced the lawgiver. The Greeks thought of their gods’ justice as fundamentally rational. Man’s responsibility was to imitate this rationality. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the other hand, God’s decrees were expressed in commandments, by no means subject to human review. Indeed, Augustine is usually credited with transforming “will” from something rational and good into a force with evil as well as good inclinations. The good was in agreement with God’s commands (“I do not seek to do my will, but the will of Him that sent me” [John :]), whereas the evil, closely related to “pride,” consciously and deliberately flouted the moral law. Pride, the ultimate source of sin, was defined by Augustine as an appetite for undue elevation. A man who succumbed to pride was a sinner whose will had deviated from the immutable good of God and toward his own good. The intellectualist Greeks found 

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it difficult to decide what to do but easy to act on ethical convictions. In Augustinian Christianity, the moral imperative was obvious, since it was given by God. Overcoming the flesh (identified as pride or evil will) was the real difficulty in moral action. As Paul confessed, “I know that in me (that is in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me” (Romans :–). Since in Augustine’s eyes the moral battle was waged not between appetite and reason but between good and evil wills, he condemned reason. Reason filled humans with pride, cultivated a sense of independence, and impelled them to defy God.⁶⁷ For Augustine, humans could not question God. Man was to be devout and obey God without seeking to comprehend the purpose behind the divine commandments. As long as the human species endured on earth, every child would be born naturally evil and deserving punishment; humanity’s moral advance toward perfection was plainly impossible. Man could only hope for personal salvation through grace. In the Augustinian framework, salvation had little to do with the course of history after Christ. The Church was not the vehicle of progress but the institutionalized organ of salvation. Its task was to ensure that Christ’s sacrifice was not forgotten before the Second Coming. Augustine was not interested in whether an increase of knowledge and a gradual amelioration of society would occur before the Last Judgment.⁶⁸ Because it might distract man from religious concerns, Augustine discouraged worldly curiosity. Consequently, his theology led to the “uncoupling of happiness and salvation from knowledge.”⁶⁹ Medieval theologians of the Augustinian tradition saw human submission to God and human participation in the divine mysteries as the proper path to salvation. They believed that the institutions of the Catholic Church were the proper occupation of revered faith and devotion, not the unbridled search for knowledge. The anti-Gnostic Controversialists jeered at what they believed to be the Gnostic idealization of intellectual curiositas, which they saw as pride, pure and simple. Irenaeus preferred a man who knew nothing and perceived no earthly causes, abiding in faith in God, to a man who fell into godlessness “through the subtleties of his questioning and through hairsplitting.” And Tertullian went so far as to banish knowledge from among the positive virtues and include the “thirst for knowledge” in his catalogue of 

Marxism as Eschatology

vices. “The freely chosen ignorantia thus can become the act of recognition of the exclusively divine right of ownership of the truth and of its disposal.”⁷⁰ The rhetoric of the Church Fathers should not be taken at face value, however. Was the Christian teaching not a form of prophetic knowledge? And was it not similar in that sense to the Gnostic search for divine inspiration? Our discussion of Gnosticism has suggested that identity between value-free intellectual curiosity and the belief in salvation through knowledge is inadequate. In Gnosticism, man was urged to search for the divine spark within, which would return him to his authentic self. Indulging in empty inquisitiveness was seen as a hollow escape, a diversion from the real concern with salvation. The blatant misreading of Gnosticism in patristic literature may be read as evidence of the proverbial anxiety of influence; after all, the New Testament provides ample evidence of both “the Christianizing of Gnosis and the Gnosticizing of Christianity.”⁷¹ The teaching of the apostle Paul, whose epistles to the Corinthians were strewn with indictments of Gnosticism, is itself deeply indebted to Gnostic doctrines. For Paul flesh and spirit, like the darkness and light of Gnosticism, are irreconcilable opposites. Redemption through Christ allows humans to prevail over the flesh and makes possible a brotherhood of mankind based on spirit. This new spirituality of men was strongly suggestive of Gnosticism’s pneumatized beings. A number of scholars reject the view that Christianity and Gnosticism are irreconcilable simply because the former was allegedly a “religion of faith” whereas the latter was a “religion of knowledge.” As for Christianity, Simone Petrement maintains, “the faith it teaches is certainly not lacking in any trace of knowledge; above all one ought not to forget that at the beginning [the truth] was thought of by Christians as being ‘knowledge’ just as much as faith.”⁷² Canonical Christian texts emphasize the salvational role of knowledge: “We have believed and have known in truth that I came from thee” (John :); “So we know and believe the love God has for us” (John :); “Thanks be to thee, holy Father . . . for the knowledge and faith and immortality which thou hast revealed to us through thy servant Jesus” (Didache :). Petrement concludes that all of the early Christians—not only Gnostics —were of the opinion that knowledge (viz. true religion) brings salvation. Besides, the patristic literature that was influenced by Plotinus openly endorsed the view that knowledge was the vehicle of salvation. Clement of 

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Alexandria, for example, suggested that the beatitude for which Christians longed was really a full realization of the contemplative union with God, a union that only the intelligent disciple could experience. Transposing the Gnostic myth of the descending and ascending soul into a Christian redemptive scheme, Origen also understood knowledge to be an essential factor in the process of redemption. Knowledge, according to Origen, could build a bridge to God if assisted by the Godlike spirit in man. Even Augustine (a onetime Gnostic, after all) did not entirely overcome this heritage. It was perhaps the enduring spell of Hellenistic intellectualism that led Augustine to urge the believer to open his eyes to the meaning of existence and come to know that salvation was possible.⁷³ The possibility of a Christian intellectual illumination was revived during the Renaissance. The Cambridge Platonists, for example, regarded contemplation of the divine plan and method to be as important as devotion. Thomas Burnet averred that “we still make a farther and farther Progress in the Knowledge of Things divine, and are transform’d from Glory to Glory, after the Image of God himself ” and that “you ought to have always before your Eyes . . . the Progress of Providence in gradually . . . illuminating Humankind.”⁷⁴ Here intellectual illumination and moral purification were both seen as integral parts of God’s great program. The founder of British empiricism, Francis Bacon, also linked redemption with the accretion of knowledge. The language of Bacon’s scientific plea to humanity to illuminate itself is quite discernibly indebted to the narrative of the Fall. For Bacon, the Fall had an epistemological side—because man fell “from his dominion over creation” and lost “that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures according to their propriety.” Bacon identified the advancement of science with the elimination of impediments to the salvational message. The removal of distorting “idols” and “phantoms,” he believed, would render “understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed.” Religious illumination “founded on the sciences [will be] not much other than the entrance into the kingdom of heaven.”⁷⁵ Another important strand of Christianity that perpetuated a positive view of human knowledge was immanent God theology. Eriugena, Eckhart, and Teilhard de Chardin represent this tradition and sought to explain why God had separated man from himself and allowed the Fall—an urgent problem for Christian thinking, because the existence of evil in the world cast doubt on God’s goodness and omnipotence. Had the dogma permitted such doubts 

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it would have fallen squarely within the tradition that sees Satan and God as equiprimordial, a major heresy in the eyes of Christians.⁷⁶ The followers of Augustine labored hard to defend the image of the world as God’s creation against the Gnostic concept of the world as a creation by demiurges. Immanent God theology grappled with this problem by connecting the story of the Fall and Redemption with God’s self-realization. God himself, by becoming a part of History, was temporalized. As Arthur Lovejoy puts it, God was “identified with the process by which the whole creation slowly and painfully ascends the scale of possibility; or, if the name is to be reversed for the summit of the scale, God was conceived as the not yet realized final term of the process.”⁷⁷ The appeal of this theological position lay in its ability to explain evil as a lack of good, a transient stage of cosmic history rather than an ontological force independent of God. When history had run its course and God had realized himself, evil was to disappear. But at the same time (and here we come to the difficulty of reconciling such theological speculation with the Christian dogma), the theological position that rendered God immanent had to make Him a part of human history. To be sure, man and God were hardly interchangeable since within history God remained infinite and man finite. But, it must have been paradoxical from the point of view of a humble Christian to see God and man become mutually dependent. Yet, in the view of the immanent God theology, only in and through mankind could God realize Himself.⁷⁸ Several implications ensued. First, since the Absolute was full and realized only by creating out of itself nonabsolute, transient realities, the course of world history, terrible as it was, was justified. Second, as the gap between fallen man and omnipotent God was significantly narrowed, man was more likely to want to liberate himself from the opposition between subject and object and to come to know himself as potentially infinite and in that sense divine. And third, immanent God theology was free of the Gnostic rejection of history, the Gnostic avoidance of the mundane in the name of the divine. It construed the distinction between the mundane and the divine as mere appearance, a fleeting moment in history. Paradoxically, the unfolding of the mundane was a divine process. At the same time immanent God theology returned to Christianity the full force of the Gnostic valuation of knowledge. God’s self-realization was predicated upon humanity’s recognition of the spiritual, infinite kernel within itself. 

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Now what is important here is that the view of history as an immanent process of the subject’s self-realization did not have to be, in and of itself, exclusively Christian. Indeed, this theological construction came very close to the Marxist view of history as an immanent process of development in which humanity, fallen and worthless, recognizes its true essence in the Marxist blueprint for man. Christians placed God in history as its immanent force. Marx secularized the divine and turned God into social necessity. Once salvation was interpreted as the arrival of man at the infinite, and once humans were viewed as vehicles of God’s self-realization, the specific title attached to the Subject of History lost much of its significance: it could be called either God or Man.⁷⁹ Marxism adopted from immanent God theology the belief in the ability of man to be saved through an intellectual union with the Absolute. Of course, it would be misleading to assert that immanent God theology was ever the canonical Christian position, equally a simplification to argue that Christianity as a whole bequeathed to Marxism its eschatologial view of knowledge. We must keep in mind the complexity and multifariousness of the Christian tradition. It is quite possible to plumb Church theology to support a claim opposite to the one I am making, and indeed Blumenberg does just this in asserting that late medieval scholastic trends laid the ground for what he regards as the modern, anti-eschatological conception of history. Blumenberg disputes Löwith’s thesis that the modern concept of historical progress is closed, and that this conception was a natural by-product of the process of the secularization of Christianity in transition to modernity. In his rebuttal, Blumenberg shows that medieval nominalists’ articulation of a set of earlier Christian ideas (separation of God and cosmos, the idea that God was hidden, and inconceivable by man) actually permitted the development of an openended, modern view of scientific progress.⁸⁰ Yet, Blumenberg’s rebuttal of the secularization thesis has surprisingly little to say about the Marxist metanarrative in which time was seen as heading clearly toward an end. It is unclear whether Blumenberg sees Marx as a modern thinker. If he does not, he ignores an intellectual tradition that passed as the embodiment of science and that made an undeniable contribution to the modern theory of society. This is an omission that renders his genealogy of modernity incomplete. Moreover, Blumenberg’s critique of the secularization thesis has been faulted for its failure to consider Protestantism as the medium for the secularization of many Christian ideas.⁸¹ Instead, Blumenberg finds the antecedents 

Marxism as Eschatology

of modernity exclusively in the nominalist tradition and the early modern scientific movement it inspired. This shortsightedness is of considerable consequence because Hegel’s philosophy, the prevailing inspiration behind Marx’s philosophy of history, is in many ways a secularized form of Protestantism. Leaving to one side the wider implications of Protestantism for the development of modernity, I will limit myself to considering how the idea of “salvation through knowledge” was incorporated into Hegel’s philosophical theology, in which the progress of consciousness was the central concern. At first sight, Protestantism appears to have denigrated knowledge no less than Augustine. Luther flatly proclaimed reason to be the enemy within us. He imparted to the believer that whoever refuses to accept it in faith, to believe it before he understands it, but insists on exploring it with his reason and his five senses, let him persist in this if he will. But our mind will never master this doctrine; it is far too lofty for our reason. Holy Writ assures us that faith alone can appropriate it . . . the knowledge of Christ and of faith is not a human work but utterly a divine gift. . . . Nothing is more dangerous than to stray into heaven with our idle speculations, there to investigate God in His incomprehensible power, wisdom and His majesty, to ask how He created the world and how He governs it.⁸²

Insofar as reason functioned within the human frame, it had access only to subjective information—the “life within.” Real knowing could take place only when mind and heart were aligned; human thinking could never be objective and was capable only of subjective intuition of God. Luther’s diatribe against knowledge appeared to fly in the face of the contention that man could save himself through an intellectual understanding of the world. Hegel was able to interpret Luther to mean the opposite, however. Since Protestants understood God as something all humans carried within themselves, Protestantism’s historical significance, in Hegel’s eyes, lay in its abandonment of the external orientation found in Catholicism, with its institutions and rituals that separate man and God, and its embrace of faith understood as a spiritual gift, manifested in the heart of the believer. Once the ritual buffers placed by the Catholic Church on the immediate union of man and God were removed, the spiritual relationship of “infinite subjectivity” (Christ) and “finite objectivity” (the believing subject) could be properly realized. All externality in the relation of man to God disappeared, and with 

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it the human sense of alienation. Hegel sets apart a place within Man’s inmost nature, in which alone Man is at home with himself and at home with God; unity with God is the only way for Man to be true to himself.⁸³ The dictum that to believe in God was to find Him inside you echoed the Gnostic belief that the divine spark was present in humanity but hidden from view. Hegel suggested this link when he wrote that Luther had benefited Christianity, and ultimately philosophy, by seeing that “faith itself is the divine Spirit that works in the subject.” For Hegel, faith was “the subjective assurance of the Eternal, of Absolute Truth, the Truth of God.” The realization of the intimate link between the subject and God formed the heart of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s absolute idealism sought to explain all existence from within consciousness itself. Not just human subjectivity but nature as a whole developed exclusively out of Spirit. An essential link was thereby established between human subjectivity and the subjectivity of the universe. This rapport between finite and infinite subjectivity was a transposition of the immanent God theology into Hegel’s secularized philosophical terminology. The historical process was identical with God’s attainment of self-knowledge: “The life of God and everything that is done in the course of time, are nothing other than the striving to the end that the spirit may recognize itself, make itself objective to itself, find itself, become for itself, and unite itself with itself.”⁸⁴ The history of God could also be seen as a history of man. Schelling formulated that proposition even better: “God leads human nature through no other course than that through which his own nature must pass. Participation in everything blind, dark, and suffering . . . is necessary in order to raise him to highest consciousness.”⁸⁵ Positing that man’s essence and God were essentially linked, and that God could be found within the heart of the believer, Hegel declared that God was incarnated in the world, inexorably linked with and realized through the community of believers. Humanity, in this view, possessed a divine spark in itself (rather than in the institutions of the Catholic Church) and was driven toward the realization of this divine Spirit through unification with God. Hegelian philosophy also resonated with the Gnostic belief that humanity is a fallen divinity destined to reclaim its true self, as well as with the Marxist contention that alienated humanity will one day rediscover its true nature and be restored in its position as the world’s subject. In his lectures on religion, Hegel affirmed the Lutheran desideratum that in faith the true content is certainly already found. What was still lacking, according to Hegel, was 

Marxism as Eschatology

the form of the Absolute; only this form could render the true content necessary, that is, intrinsically connect our subjective sense of self with our objective historical situatedness, our spirituality and our material concreteness. Reason—the knowledge of God or the Absolute—was what endowed man with his unique form and distinguished him from the animals. Targeting Protestant mystics, Hegel pointed out that if feelings were to constitute the essential condition of man, he would be little different from the animals who live by their passions alone. In Reason in History Hegel restated his position in no uncertain terms: “Given the possibility of knowing God, it becomes incumbent upon us to do so; and the development of thinking spirit . . . must ultimately mature to the point where what was in the first instance presented to feeling and imagining spirit is grasped in thought.”⁸⁶ According to Hegel, the infinite needed the finite—“to be thought by humans is part of the concept of the Absolute that, according to its Idea, has to make itself objective for itself.” It was not enough for the Absolute to be in itself self-sufficient; it must also exist for itself, and for this, humans had to be conscious of the Absolute. There could be no God without the believer through which God realized Himself and no believer without God from whom the believer drew his spirituality—so Hegel restated the position of the immanent God theology. The community of believers was essential to God because only through the recognition of the believers could He become self-conscious. For Hegel, “the concept of God thus led necessarily of itself to religion.” Inversely, man needed God because “men are related to the world’s spirit as individual parts to the whole that is their substance. . . . Insofar as God is omnipresent, he is in every man, he appears in everyone’s consciousness as the world’s spirit.”⁸⁷ The human consciousness of the Spirit, or the self-consciousness of the Spirit, was the goal of history, the path by which the Absolute proceeded toward self-consciousness. The existence of evil, or in other words the necessity of history itself, was explained by Hegel as a necessary stage in the dialectical elevation of the human being to consciousness of the infinite. As Hegelian scholarship shows, “Hegel delights in pointing out that the story of the Fall promises that human beings will become like God in eating of the tree of knowledge. The transgression, absolutely necessary, must be interpreted dialectically, not as a transgression that might not have been but as an absolute necessity that had to be if the human being were to become the spirit it implicitly is.”⁸⁸ 

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Once again we witness a drive to reconcile the obviously gruesome course of human history with the belief that the good and omnipotent God stood behind this history. Anticipating Marx, Hegel universalized the implicit meaning of the Fall by freeing it from the particular structure of the biblical story. The issue for him was still “original humanity” but now original “not in terms of some quasi-biological inheritance but in terms of an implicit concept of humanity.”⁸⁹ This implicit concept was cleavage: humanity had to lose itself in order to leave behind its naive state in paradise and thereby regain itself, this time self-conscious. It was the faith in Christ as the Lord and Logos of history that Hegel translated into a “metaphysical Spirit unfolding itself in the process of History.”⁹⁰ Another way to conceive of Hegelian history was to rephrase its eschatological meaning in Romantic terms, as gradual progress toward the awareness of freedom. An apocalyptic design was the central feature of Romantic thought, a feature shared by Hegel and Marx. The aim of the Romantics was to translate the conceptual truth inherent within the Christian myth into the secular conception of universal history. Abrams confirms the thesis that the Hegelian dialectic—the view that history develops through a series of contradictions, which finally resolve themselves—was a secularized Christian apocalyptic view of history as an ever-widening struggle between good and evil. “The overall plot and the critical events of biblical History, conceptualized, thus reappear as the constitutive paradigm in the systems of Romantic philosophy, however diverse the details in each system.” This influence is clear in the Romantic philosophers’ annunciation of metaphysical systems that are not static, “but are constantly on the move, and their movement is end-oriented.” The mythical moment when the unitary Absolute set itself off as object to itself was a secularized rendition of the beginning as Creation. “This primal self-division inaugurates a process of ever-renewing others, or oppositions, or antitheses which impel a movement, through a crisis, toward the last, far-off, divine event toward which both speculative thinking and the universe inevitably move.” Abrams shows how the biblical tendency to set up opposed pairs of absolute contraries and its destined outcome were secularized in Romantic philosophy, from which Hegel acquired this technique.⁹¹ For the Romantics and Hegel alike, the evil of the world had to reach its climax before God swept it away in one tremendous upheaval. History operated so that when evil had reached its height the hopeless situation would undergo a reversal. The same apocalyptic imagination was evident 

Marxism as Eschatology

in Marx’s scientific teaching that “on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word will always be: Combat or death; struggle or extinction. . . . It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that ‘social evolutions’ will cease to be ‘social revolutions.’ ”⁹² Whether we use the Hegelian-Marxist terms to speak of “contradictions inherent in the course of mundane history,” or the Christian language of “apocalyptic struggles,” we find in both positions dialectical tensions that propelled history toward a resolution of all human conflicts, consciousness, and freedom. Marx went beyond Hegel because he was dissatisfied with the Hegelian interpretation of the role of human agency in bringing about the End of History. For Hegel, the subject who at the last stage of history was to discover his subjective freedom and consciousness was the philosopher, and not the ordinary man. Shlomo Avineri pointed out that, in Hegel’s system, “though the philosopher is able to offer a synthesis, it is still external to the subjective element in History, and it always remains an open problem whether anyone except the philosopher shares the consciousness of progressing toward the consciousness of freedom.”⁹³ Hegel’s ordinary man was forever in a passive position, a vessel of the historical process and not a conscious actor. The Hegelian view of history failed to deliver on its promise to adequately close the gap between subject and object: those who act in history do not understand it, and those who understand it do not act upon it. The “Cunning of Reason” (List der Vernunft)—the Hegelian notion that the progress of history was mediated through the subjective motives of various historical agents, motives completely unrelated to the goal of history—never succeeded in really uniting subjective motivation and objective historical role. Avineri incisively shows that in the Hegelian system the question of how much the world-historical individuals were aware of the significance of their deeds remained unanswered. This presented a serious epistemological problem, because Hegel’s entire scheme of history was based on the notion of selfconsciousness. “Since it is the development toward the consciousness of freedom, that is, self-consciousness, that is the main theme of Hegel’s philosophy of history, the subjective awareness of the significance of historical action is of prime importance.” While the more recent individuals of world history should have been more conscious of their role than those of earlier periods, since the historical periods they acted in represented a higher stage of consciousness, Hegel did not argue that this was the case. World histori

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cal individuals from different periods were equally vessels of cunning reason, tools of history and not its subjects. In this scenario, history’s conscious agent was superhuman. If ordinary humans became conscious of history, this was a by-product of the End of History, not its prerequisite. The individual, according to Hegel, strove without distinctly knowing what it was he strove for until he achieved it: “Every individual must pass through the contents of the educational stages of the general spirit as stages of a way that has been prepared and evened for him.”⁹⁴ The crux of the paradox, as Avineri sees it, is that the only aspect of history that does not develop is the vehicle of historical change itself—the world-historical individual. The resulting passive view of human agency was the root of Hegelian political conservatism.⁹⁵

Salvational Consciousness in Marx Marx, on the other hand, regarded the consciousness of selected individuals —the revolutionaries—as an indispensable precondition of the End of History. In endowing his followers with consciousness, Marx assigned men an active role in the historical process. To account for the origins of the capacity for freedom on the part of the revolutionary elect, he introduced the idea of proletariat into the historical debate. Marx did not conceive of the Absolute as a transcendental spirit descending into humanity, but as the true essence of humanity, which came into its own through labor. Marx also resorted to the idea of the “cunning of reason”—the potential source of man’s self-consciousness, present in the world as an alienated human labor, which drove history blindly forward. But whereas history had been progressing toward the Apocalypse through the tortuous medium of the class struggle, Marx introduced the proletariat as the historical subject in which the essence of labor broke through and became conscious of itself. Other classes were revolutionary to the extent that they drove history forward. The proletariat, however, was the first class also to understand the historical meaning of its revolutionary actions. Marx did not make historical agency a spirit but claimed that the spirit of freedom was embodied in a real human being whose actual engagement in labor gradually spiritualized him. According to Marx, consciousness is something that the world must acquire, like it or not. The reform of consciousness consists only in enabling the world to clarify its



Marxism as Eschatology consciousness, in waking from its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. . . . Our motto must be: Reform of consciousness . . . which is not clear to itself. . . . Then it will transpire that the world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it.⁹⁶

Thus the goal of history remained for Marx the same as for Hegel—selfconsciousness. But it was the self-consciousness of man, not of the universal Spirit, that characterized the End of History for Marx. This conception, in the words of Kolakowski, “brought a new eschatology into view.” In Marx’s doctrine, the Subject of History had to be objectified —it was not sufficient to subjectify the object. The essence of man had to be embodied in real action. In the Marxist view, humans could not achieve consciousness through illumination alone. The path to freedom would open only once the real production system had been transformed so as to be able to generate a spiritualized producer. Only when laborers could change the circumstances of their lives through action could a “change of self ” occur.⁹⁷ Once a change in the real, which lay entirely within man’s abilities, acquired the dimension of a spiritual breakthrough, the termination of history came to be within man’s control, and no longer required the universal Spirit. Yet, it is misleading to suggest a strong opposition between the so-called Marxist materialism and Hegelian idealism, whether religious or philosophical, on the grounds of Marx’s own pretension that he was interested in “concrete” human beings and not in an “abstract” spirit. To be sure, Marx held that real, concrete human beings drove history forward, not abstractions such as God or the Absolute. “History does nothing,” Marx asserted, “it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles’; it is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights. ‘History’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”⁹⁸ Indeed, Marx’s conception of man was not abstract in the sense that for Marx man was not an immutable given, as he was in the Enlightenment theories of human nature; instead, he was a self-realizing project. In writing that “all History is nothing but a continual transformation of human nature,” Marx was reacting against ahistorical theorizing of the “constant and universal principles of human nature” (David Hume) according to which man was conceived as equipped with immutable appetites and qualities. All this, however, does not change the fact

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that “Man” remained in the Marxist corpus a general concept, and in that sense an abstraction. As one scholar convincingly argues, Marx, “an intellectual like the Hegelians, set out from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived. But he narrates them, thinks of them, imagines them, conceives them in a different way from the German philosophers and this is what he should have said.”⁹⁹ Though Marx distanced himself from the ahistorical philosophizing of the Enlightenment on the nature of man, he was certainly in sympathy with the Enlightenment’s advocacy of Revolution as an event that would close the gap between the empirical man and the ideal man. For the political thought of the French Revolution, “the true people was an ideal. The people did not exist except potentially, in the consciousness or imagination.”¹⁰⁰ Heir to the way the Enlightenment tradition posed the question, Marx elaborated an abstract notion of man that humanity should have realized. Thus Marx’s view of man was not antiphilosophical. Rather, it was a specific philosophical position, one that put “Man” at the center of being and historicized him. Empirical human beings, in Marx’s eyes, were removed from the essence of man as they were from the divine or the absolute. In a sense, the Marxist “Man” was just another term for God or Spirit, as long as those were seen as evolving historically, as they did in immanent God theology or Hegelian philosophy. Marx’s ultimate ideal was spiritual, not materialistic. Having arrived at the realization that the world was merely an externalization of his mind, man was to have to comprehend that he was the true Subject of the universe and its motive force. The process of man’s self-liberation was to obliterate “the distinction between knower and known; the subject and object are once more united, and the world ceases to be a foreign realm into which the soul makes its entrance from outside.” The Marxists predicted a future where, “labor—sacred labor—will become the master of our lives” (a Bolshevik leaflet from ); Pre-revolutionary Russian workers allegedly waited for the time when “we will not say, ‘I must work’ but ‘I want to work’!”¹⁰¹ Interpreting Marx in the light of his roots in Gnostic and Neoplatonic spiritualism, I propose that Marx saw in self-knowledge, and not in economic equality, the essence of human freedom. Communism, he wrote, “is the complete return of Man to himself, . . . a return accomplished consciously embracing the entire wealth of previous development. . . . Communism is the riddle of History solved and it knows itself to be this solution.”¹⁰² I want to emphasize that the Marxist notion of the resolution of the contradiction 

Marxism as Eschatology

between the individual and his species should be interpreted not so much as the abolition of the economic disparity between men but as man’s recognition of himself in others. This realization was to be the defining moment in man’s arrival at self-awareness. Not that economic equality was unimportant for Marx. But its real significance lay not in its intrinsic value but in its being the vehicle that removed epistemological obstacles. Although Marx disagreed with Hegel’s strategy for achieving human liberation, he shared Hegel’s hope for the end result—universal self-consciousness.¹⁰³ After the Revolution, “true human History will commence,” which is to say the history of the New Man who was to mold himself, in free labor, into whatever he wanted to be. The reader will recall the Romantic Marx who posited that what made man free was the conscious projection of a possible future state of things and the practical activity man took to achieve this state. If his practice was in fact self-expressive, man would live up to his ideal of self-determination. Freedom would lead to the transformation of action dictated by immediate needs into actions imbued with human intentionality. In Marx’s words, “the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits.”¹⁰⁴ Rather than engage in a perpetual exchange with nature just to sustain its bodily existence, the self-consciously self-determining free human labor was to engage in, as it were, play with nature. Humanity was to set itself constantly new demands and was to use nature as a medium to enrich its imagination and consciousness. In a sense, the Marxist view of free human activity—the self-expression of emancipated man—collapsed the distinction between the signified (work) and the signifier (thought). Under Communism, no external forces were to separate work and thought. The gap between conceiving and producing that which had been conceived, the gap between theory and practice, was to close. In the regained paradise of Communism, whatever came to the human mind was effortlessly to become a reality. Marx elevated consciousness to a supreme position and demanded that conscious man assert control over his body. “The Communist society,” he predicted, “will be a world inhabited by a whole new race, in effect, in all of whom there will be an ‘altered consciousness’ (or, to put it in the old apocalyptic style, ‘spiritualized’)—altered in that what have appeared to be the deepest drives in human nature have been transformed.”¹⁰⁵ Human conflicts would proliferate as long as clashing class interests, “the intense desire to 

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gain wealth and power, to dominate,” brought out the animal in man and blinded humanity to its collective essence. The social forces that, in Marx’s view, overwhelmed consciousness were analogous to the internal animalistic drives, which in the Platonic and Christian traditions obstructed humans from within. This was how Trotsky envisioned the condition of the emancipated human being: Man will, at last, begin to harmonize himself in earnest. . . . He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then also the unconscious processes of his own organism . . . and, within the necessary limits, will subordinate them to the control of reason and will. . . . The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the state of radical reconstruction and will become in its own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychological training . . . Man will make it his goal to master his own emotions, to elevate his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent.¹⁰⁶

We can read into the Marxist notion of “blind class interests” Plato’s “body” or the Christian “weak and tempting flesh.” Was the Marxist urge to overcome particularism and to rise to universalist consciousness not an echo of the Neoplatonic and the Christian urge to overcome desire by raising the self to the level of the “thinking soul”? Western tradition consistently put its wager on universal knowledge in the contest against the low and animalistic in man, whatever content the latter was assigned. Marx appears to be only one of the more recent exponents of this eschatological tradition.

The Millenarian Mind The precise nature of the rapport between the Marxist and the Christian conceptions of historical agency requires additional clarification. Both eschatologies described history as a process that developed according to a plan: since for Marx this plan described man’s ascent in the ladder of knowledge he made man the Subject of History. Several branches of Christianity also attributed eschatological significance to the ability of the believer to approach God. Still, in Christianity, it was for God to decide when the Apocalypse was to come. This is the argument of David Bethea, who claims that utopias of the Christian apocalyptic and the Marxist stripe had radically different conceptions of the authority that governed history. “To the one, this 

Marxism as Eschatology

authority comes from God, who is outside human history; to the other, this authority comes from human beings, who can make themselves and their ideal polis within history, if only they really try.”¹⁰⁷ Yet, it appears to me that the modern humanist rhetoric overemphasized the power Marx assigned humans over their destiny, and traditional rhetoric of subservience before God underemphasized the amount of control Christians were generally believed to have over history. Although historical actors in the two conceptual schemes are utterly different, a conceptual bridge between the two traditions could be made out. In Christianity it was up to God to decide the timing of the Apocalypse; nonetheless, believers were discouraged from passivity and fatalism. At the very least they had to prepare their souls for the end of time by actively seeking God; occasionally they were actually called upon to search for signs of the coming Apocalypse. If found, those signs prompted the believers to actively inaugurate the divine community already on earth. Messianic Christianity came close to Marxism. Millenarianism held that redemption can be hurried through a collective intervention of men in the course of history. Never to be caught fatalistically awaiting the end of time, Christian messianic movements were imbued with an “active desire to speed the inevitable result, often through violent, revolutionary means.”¹⁰⁸ Whereas Augustine emphasized “those aspects of the Final Judgment that applied to the individual soul,” messianic Christianity stressed other aspects that applied to the community of the believers. Joachim of Flora, among the influential early Christian millenarian prophets, asserted that through illumination and exegesis he had discovered the possibility of a collective paradise on earth. Joachim was certain that he had found a key that, when applied to the sacred text and particularly to the Book of Revelations, enabled him to perceive in history a pattern and a meaning and to prophesy in detail its future stages. According to Augustine, the individual believer could only patiently await the heavenly kingdom of the beyond. Joachim of Flora, by contrast, postulated the advent of an age of the Holy Spirit, a period of fulfillment within history. Joachim’s placement of the third age of the Holy Spirit within history influenced the Western apocalyptic thought surfacing in the utopias of Muntzer, Campanella, Lessing, in the Third State of Auguste Comte, and in Marx’s Communism.¹⁰⁹ Two aspects of Joachim’s millenarianism render it especially significant for the study of the Christian roots of Marxism. First, he saw salvation as a 

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collective and not an individual affair. Second, he placed salvation within history and linked it with history’s previous stages so that his prophecy amounted to foreknowledge of the divine plan. In the opinion of Norman Cohn, the Joachimite theory of the three stages reappeared in the Marxist dialectic of the three stages of primitive Communism, class society and a final Communism which promises to be the realm of freedom. Cohn shows that in the millenarian doctrine of the egalitarian state of nature the promised salvation was likewise terrestrial and collective. The heavenly city was to appear on this earth, and its joys were to crown not the peregrinations of individual souls but the epic exploits of a “chosen people.”¹¹⁰ The original message of the New Testament promised divine kingdom on earth, not in heaven. Only after the Church moved from a persecuted position to a position of power did the Augustinian allegorical interpretation of the earthly kingdom become the established Church doctrine. Descriptions of the terrestrial and transcendent divine kingdom, however, were more or less the same, leading Milton to dismiss the question of whether paradise was to reign in heaven or on earth. When “this world’s dissolution shall be ripe,” Christ will return “to reward / His faithful and receive them into bliss . . . / Whether in Heav’n or Earth, for then the Earth, Shall all be Paradise.”¹¹¹ The real significance of the question as to where paradise was to be located lay with the implications for the notion of action. If the believer held that the new heaven was to be located on earth, he had to conclude that he could take active steps toward its construction. Divine intervention may have yielded to—or at least was supplanted by—the activity of human agency. “If the celestial heaven was to be dismantled in order to be rebuilt on earth,” Carl Becker noted in reference to the Enlightenment thought, “it seemed that the salvation of mankind must be attained, not by some outside, miraculous, catastrophic agency (God or the philosopher King) but by man himself.”¹¹² In Marx’s vision, Communism was to be built by the victorious revolutionary proletariat who would construct an earthly Communist paradise. The belief in this wordly paradise and the concomitant emphasis on human agency in the Christian millenarianism of the Reformation foreshadowed revolutionary Marxism. The righteous had to take up arms and actively prepare the way for the millennium by wielding the sword against the unrighteous. Matthys, the leader of the revolutionary Anabaptists, taught that nothing would come of simply waiting for God’s intervention.¹¹³ Michael Walzer provides a powerful description of how the Puritans, even 

Marxism as Eschatology

while believing in predestination (a doctrine one would expect to induce extreme fatalism), were still obliged to take an active part in building a saintly community. “It is certainly the duty of the Christian man,” Walzer cites Calvin, “to ascend higher than merely to seek and secure the salvation of his own soul.”¹¹⁴ The activity of the militant Puritan zealot, whom Walzer regards as a forerunner of the modern revolutionary, carried him outside the Church and into participation in congregational government, of which the goal was to erect the holy commonwealth. Walzer proposes to understand the activity of the chosen as “an organized effort to universalize sainthood,” to reconstruct or reform the world according to objective criteria as revealed, predetermined, or written, and thereby to transform England into a holy commonwealth. Setting out on the revolutionary road, the Puritans had to lay claim to a special knowledge that would justify their radicalism—a vision of the future polity for which the present was to be renounced. Walzer maintains that for Puritans “the crucial distinction among men was between those who possessed this knowledge and those who did not.”¹¹⁵ Congregational unity resembled that of strict collectivism, uniting those who knew, disciplining them, and transforming the local church into a voluntary association of the holy. Puritans replaced the sacramental priesthood, which enjoyed its status ex officio, with a preaching ministry that had to earn its reputation by its education: “The Lord hath tied the food of understanding and knowledge unto the mouths of those pastors who . . . in regard of gifts are according unto his heart,” wrote one Puritan evangelist. Another concurred: “the minister was the oracle of the church . . . and no such man could be ‘without a great and excellent knowledge of the Word of God.’ ”¹¹⁶ Protestant zealots led messianic movements inspired by the belief that a sign of the end had revealed itself, just as Marxist theoreticians urged the proletariat to rise up by announcing the appearance of harbingers of Revolution. Tuveson points to a rather curious paradox: “The firm conviction that a sequence of events, leading to universal redemption, is ordained (or “determined”) would seem to lead to passivity on the part of an individual; one must only wait for the predicted events to occur.” But, Tuveson points to a vitally important qualification: “Although the series of events is prophesied, their timing may be retarded by the failure of mankind. To delay the coming of redemption, then, is a great sin, against one’s fellow beings, against posterity, against the power that has ordained events.” Wholehearted, zealous participation in the historically determined duties, doing what the old 

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millenarians would call “doing God’s will,” gives, by contrast, special eclat: “In most millennarian groups there is something corresponding to the ‘Communist Party.’ ”¹¹⁷ Communism could therefore be seen as a messianic movement guided by Marxist theory, which provided the disciples with an elaborate hermeneutics of signs to interpret the distance from the present historical station to full human emancipation and the End of History. The complexity of the tasks demanded of men by millenarianism suggests a defense of Löwith’s secularization thesis so far as it applies to Marx. Blumenberg distinguishes too sharply between voluntarism, which he imputes to modernity, and passivity, which he imputes to Christianity. Blumenberg maintains that the modern project focused on the human, not on the divine. In modern self-understanding, he argues, human progress was immanent to history and could not be seen as the product of transcendent intervention. On this basis, he concludes that modernity could not be a variation on the medieval, for what defined the modern was precisely its attempt to ground itself in human self-assertion rather than in theological dispensation. “Selfassertion,” one of Blumenberg’s key terms, is defined as an “existential program, according to which man posits his existence in an historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him.”¹¹⁸ My counterclaim is that modernity did not postulate an unfettered voluntarism. Blumenberg overlooks that for Marx (and for any modern social scientists, for that matter) human freedom was largely an illusion. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past,” writes Marx.¹¹⁹ Human agency was constrained by the dictates of objective conditions of human existence in the modern view as well. In a sense, social structure replaced God as a limiting force. Voluntarism was constrained by the determinism of the social. Radically distancing himself from Christianity, Marx claimed that men could emancipate themselves without God because the structures that constrained them were of their own doing. But (and this is crucial for our argument) human agency could produce the desired result only if it followed the pre-given, objective pattern of historical development. The shift of the historical subject from God to man hardly granted ordinary men additional 

Marxism as Eschatology

freedom because, according to Marx, it was not the empirical human being but the prescriptive idea of man that drove history forward. In Marxism the human world, although in one sense the locus of action and freedom, was on the other hand nothing but a secondary nature to be molded in accord with an established blueprint. The development of society was not openended. No wonder, writes Merleau-Ponty, the Christian and Marxist notions of action as predetermined by history led to messianic terror: “If the Revolution is in things, how could one hesitate to brush aside by any means resistances which are only apparent? If the revolutionary function of the proletariat is engraved in the infrastructure of capital, the political action which expresses it is justified just as the Inquisition was justified by Providence.” In presenting itself as the reflex of that-which-is, writes Merleau-Ponty, the historical process in itself “grants itself the basis of an absolute knowledge at the same time as it authorizes itself to extract from History by violence a meaning which resides there, yet is profoundly hidden.” Regarding terror as the fulfillment of the Marxist theory of action, not as its aberration, MerleauPonty concludes that “the melange of objectivism and extreme subjectivism, the one constantly sustaining the other, which defines Bolshevism already exists in Marx when he admits that the revolution is present before being recognized.”¹²⁰ In Marxism, voluntarism and determinism were locked together in a configuration predetermined by the process of History. When I describe Marxism as eschatological, I am not implying any detachment from the present or the passive expectation of the End of History (characteristics of the eschatological otherworldliness in the conservative Christian tradition that were alien to Marx), but rather the attention given to the historical present only to the extent that it was a stage leading toward the final event, itself an immanent outgrowth of the present. Marx had nothing but contempt for those who gave up any action in expectation that the end of time would come unassisted, but he nonetheless did adopt the basic premise of all eschatological thinking, namely that History moves toward a preordained conclusion. Marxist eschatological thinking fostered a practice of historical exegesis, that is, an interpretation of historical contingency according to a given metahistorical narrative. This exegesis, and not the volition of concrete men, informed Marxist action just as biblical exegesis informed the behavior of Christians. In its general contours, Marxist eschatology was both narratological and historiosophic. Marx interrogated history in philosophical terms in order to 

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understand Man’s essence. Concomitantly, he learned from philosophy how history was to be interpreted. In keeping with the best Gnostic tradition, Marx told man where he had come from, what he was now, what he could be, and how he could convey himself from here to there. This eschatological narrative took the form of the development of consciousness terminating in universal conversion to Marxism. Whatever the merits of Abrams’s contention that the Romantics, disillusioned with the failure of the French Revolution, internalized the Apocalypse and gave it a spiritual interpretation defined not by the objective course of history but by the evolution of the individual’s spirituality, such an explication does not do justice to the eschatological thinking of Marx. Marx did not substitute the superhuman Heilsgeschichte for the Bildungsgeschichte of the individual but linked the two.¹²¹ In Marx’s prophecy, the course of history and human knowledge of history were to become united at the end. Or, to put it even more strongly, history was to arrive at its end as man gained knowledge of what that end should be. Since the endpoint of history in Marxism was preordained, the progression of consciousness was predetermined as well. This point leads us to an important aspect of Marxist thinking already hinted at in the beginning of this chapter: if there was only one philosophical truth that provided the key to human nature, there could be only one view of the historical process that expressed that truth. Marxists considered history to be imbued with a unique meaning unfolding along a straight path. The singularity of history and the importance of predicting its correct course explain the refusal of all Marxists to compromise over the interpretation of history. Lenin firmly believed that all but the orthodox view would lead humanity astray: “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan, but our cause requires the unity of Marxists, not the unity of Marxists with the enemies and distorters of Marxism!”¹²² Those who advocated the heterodox path were regarded as evil and diabolic, counterrevolutionary forces to be ruthlessly eliminated.



The Janus-Faced Messiah

2

IT IS TIME to move from the discussion of Marxist eschatology as such to an examination of the ways in which Russian revolutionary discourse activated this eschatological potential. The messianic characteristics of Marxism came into sharp relief in Russia, not in Western Europe where Marx did most of his preaching. Was Marxism adapted to Russian conditions, that is, was it “Russified”? Or did the new ideology actually function as a means to modernize Russia and instill post-Reformation values? There might be elements in the religious tradition in Russia (Orthodoxy and sectarianism) and in Bolshevism’s roots in nineteenth-century Russian intellectual tradition (the legacy of the radical movement) that can explain some eschatological attributes of turn-of-the-century Russian history. Overall, however, we have seen that Marxism introduced a Western type of political messianism into Russia. Be that as it may, little will be said below about the origins of Russian Marxism and its relationship to the West. An extensive investigation into the reception of Marxism in Russia lies outside the bounds of the present study. In any case, my argument is structural, not genealogical, which means that I ask what Russian Marxism was, rather than what its historical roots were. Whether Russian Marxism was shot through with eschatological categories because Marx’s thought was eschatological in itself, or because the Marxist canon was subjected to a peculiar idiosyncratic reading by the eschatologically minded, late nineteenth-century, Russian educated public will remain an open question. If the secularization process in Russia or the cultural borrowings of Russian modernity were the focus of my discussion, Orthodoxy would have to be considered a source of Russian Marxism. This, however, is 

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not the present case. Rather than exploring the historical gestation of Russian Marxism, I would like to point in this chapter to the presence of eschatological reasoning in Russian Marxist theories of the world. The language of Russian revolutionaries is unfathomable unless we explicate the surrounding conceptual field that invested this language with meaning. It would be a serious mistake to conflate the Russian Marxists’ observations of their world (observations made as part of their quest for a messiah) with what positivist historians consider the objective conditions of the tsarist empire or of early Soviet Russia. Socioeconomic entities and events functioned in the discourse of the Russian Marxists not only as scientific referents to empirical contents but as mythical agents of universal salvation. It is crucial to understand that Russian Marxists thought in mythical terms, and that their thinking was propelled by the breathtaking myth of world Revolution. I use the term “myth” in a historical context, to point to a situation in which political action was triggered by the meanings assigned by storytelling. A myth results when a historical event, specifically defined in time and place, is transformed into a transcendent value. Myths, according to Mircea Eliade, translate the real “into the terms of the ideal, . . . the durative and transcendental.” What is meant here by “myth,” then, has nothing to do with the cynical devices politicians purportedly use to justify their actions. Indeed, the myth/reality opposition is best dispensed with altogether. Myths, I suggest, are not exactly false; rather, the truth of a myth simply cannot be established from historical evidence.¹ The Marxist myth was a metanarrative by which Russian revolutionaries analyzed events, and it provided participants in the revolutionary discourse with a framework that integrated the ostensibly fortuitous incidents of Russian history into a transcendental whole. Events that symbolized the salvational meaning contained within history were highlighted; other events, not accorded similar weight, were treated as little more than transitory manifestations of the incidental and the trivial that had no bearing on the salvational truth. Because their discourse was mythical, Russian Marxists were interested not in a quantitative or piecemeal improvement, but in a qualitative otherness. The myth that permeated the Marxist discourse identified a historical ideal (classless society) with a historical event (the Revolution). Conversely, the Marxist myth transmuted a mundane historical event (the toppling of the tsarist government in ) into a historical ideal. The Marxist myth was of course somewhat different than the myths Eliade had in mind; 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

the Russian revolutionaries, positioned as they were in the eschatological convergence of ideal being and historical becoming, attempted to reach transcendence not by dismissing mundane temporality but by valorizing it as a springboard for the leap into the perfect beyond. What made their conception of history mythical, nonetheless, was that they advocated a notion of teleological historical movement. One of the peculiarities of the Marxist myth was that, by transforming history into a one-way boulevard of progress leading to consummation, it discarded the opposition between sacred time and profane time and thus rendered mythic historical time itself. Whenever a telos is present, a myth is also present. Obsessed with composing historical narratives, Russian revolutionaries did not just experience history, but seeking to realize its inner meaning, they essentially constructed it as a work of art. In the Marxist imagination, history was an aesthetic whole that assumed form when the synthetic principle was applied to the empirical data of sociopolitical events. What Marxist texts actually presented, as Leonard Wessell demonstrates, was a “drama”—the drama of salvation through the medium of history.² Dramatists (and Marxist thinkers, writing script after script for the world Revolution, were precisely that) must select certain facts, plans, and texts and then arrange them in a certain sequence. This ordering of occurrences invests them with messianic value, elevating a series of discrete political acts to the status of meaningful, world-liberating action. The Marxist myth had the effect of freezing the Russian revolutionary discourse, fixing the axes along which it could develop around the conflict between the exploited and the exploiters. Even when making historical change the center of the plot, myths tend to be immutable. As John Marcus shows, myths are inclined to act as a conservative force, not in the sense that they necessarily resist change in society (the Russian Marxists were obviously interested in nothing of the kind) but rather in the sense that myths resist change in their own basic poetical structure.³ All this bears directly on how the history of revolutionary Russia should be written: separating his own sense of time from that which guided the historical protagonists under study, the historian of the Russian revolutionary discourse has to proceed cautiously. In order to resist the temptation to replicate Marxist mythologizing, he must postpone the construction of a historical narrative of his own. Otherwise he runs the risk of inadvertently becoming a participant in mythmaking. The naive notion that we can extricate ourselves 

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from the grip of the sources’ metanarrative by disputing this or that empirical statement contained within the sources must be avoided. If the historian is not careful, the causality that informs his own narrative becomes embedded in the Marxist eschatology. In examining the Marxist eschatological narrative below, I do not therefore presuppose the existence of a deep structure—social or economic—that has to be “unearthed” in order to explain how contemporary narratives came into being. Such a project would only result in one more narrative, contributing to a scholarly literature that already contains too many. Systematically refraining from telling a story of my own, I prefer to examine the kind of stories Marxists themselves were fond of telling. Consequently, in this chapter I shall sidestep the issue of how the Marxist discourse in Russia evolved over time. My guiding assumption is that revolutionary myths mattered, that they often influenced historical reality no less than what positivist historians call objective events. It is less important at this stage to know how various Marxist texts differed, and why, than to recognize how they resembled each other by force of the common myth they propounded. Thus I contend that a synchronic approach to historical material is necessary. It is only after the structure of the Marxist myth is clarified that diachronical inquiry can ensue. For generations historians viewed myths as a subjective and myopic representation of the actual historical record. Commemorating events to suit the interests of the ruling party, helping to perpetuate power relations in society, the myth was perceived as a barrier rather than a vehicle to understanding. Myth shrouded reality and was certainly not something that allowed us to fathom its secrets. The historian’s task was to transcend the obfuscation that myths generate, and discover the pre-mythical, the true facts hidden from the public’s memory. I, however, would like to reverse this ontology, and suggest prioritizing myth over history for a moment. According to this approach, one that historical anthropology has advanced for some time, history begins when a myth repeats itself, when it is acted out by those whose discourse the myth has shaped. In the present case, the promise of world redemption was a myth which Russian Marxists assiduously tried to actualize. This myth had no clear historical referent: its principal protagonists—mature capitalism and the messianic agencies it supposedly produced—were not to be found in late imperial Russia. Nevertheless, the Marxist myth gradually created its referent. In this sense the myth of the Revolution was primary; the Revolution of  itself was secondary. Contrary to the common wisdom by which continual repetition renders 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

myths ossified, the myth of the revolutionaries became increasingly more vibrant and powerful the more they repeated this myth. It can even be argued that the myth became true, in the sense that it shaped Russian history in its own image. Myths make history. Russian Marxists responded to events as a received category, as tokens of a presupposed taxonomy. It would appear to follow that, as the cliché goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” If structural/semiotic analysis of “discourse” is to be applied to history, then change and practice are lost. Some, as Marshall Sahlins pointed out, might think that this lost material is the real subject of history. That would be reason enough to reject out of hand such a synchronic approach. It is possible, however, that the sacrifice attending synchronic analysis— those lost events and actions of this world—are not truly necessary. Never absolutely inert, myth simultaneously informs historical action while, in turn, absorbing its effects, and changing in the process. Though a conservative force, myth is not lifeless. To cite Marshall Sahlins again, “on the one hand, contexts of practical action are resumed by already given concepts for actors, things and their relations (reproduction). On the other, the specificity of practical circumstances, people’s differential relation to them, and the set of particular arrangements that ensue (structure of the conjuncture) sediment new functional values on old categories.”⁴ When Lenin seized power in Russia his victory became a novel source of legitimacy for the Bolshevik regime for decades afterwards, and a source of lament for the Mensheviks during the same time period. In demonstrating its capacity for creativity and change, the Marxist myth bifurcated into a myth and a countermyth. Indeed, mythical signs are subject to contingent rearrangements—depending on the strategies of interpretation politicians use to inform their actions—that potentially affect their semantic values. All such inflections of meaning derive from the ways in which revolutionaries use the sign in their own particular circumstances. The conventional value of the sign acquires an intentional value. The conceptual meaning acquires an actionable reference. Action (diachrony) begins and ends in structure (synchrony)—which is the myth. It begins in the projects of historically situated actors and ends by absorbing the effects, thus becoming a new myth. This is what Sahlins calls “a cultural practico-inert.” Yet in the interim the categories may be functionally displaced. Their respective positional values may be altered. This is how a new structural order assumes form. In this chapter I examine how revolutionary events in Russia were ordered by myth. 

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In the next chapter we will also see how, in that very process, the myth was reordered, and how its reproduction became its transformation.⁵ Like every myth, the Marxist myth had its heroes. Comparative studies of myths demonstrate that the figure of a savior appears in all dramas of redemption. Marx crowned the proletariat—a class he claimed was uniquely virtuous enough to be equal to the task of world Revolution—as the world’s redeemer. But, for reasons elaborated below, ascent to classless society was not something the proletariat could achieve alone. According to the Russian Marxists there was another savior, a cultural hero and bearer of the Gnostic message, who mediated between consciousness and the proletariat: a child of this world and the second half of the Janus-faced Marxist messiah—the intelligentsia—was that savior, one able to partake, by virtue of its omnipotent consciousness, not only in the here and now but also in the classless beyond. As is often the case in myths, such a mixture of transcendent and mundane, of sacred and profane, was precisely the source of the intelligentsia’s redemptive power. The intelligentsia was entrusted with the task of alerting the proletariat to its messianic role. But once its task was completed it had to disappear, relinquishing the stage to the proletariat. Hence the paradoxical, self-destructive ambivalence surrounding the conceptualization of the intelligentsia as a class both vile and pure, a central but irritating necessity which reminded Russian Marxists that full emancipation still lay ahead. What actually are the proletariat and the intelligentsia? Many historians of the Russian revolutionary movement, assuming these entities to be social groups, do not recognize their eschatological role and move immediately to the question of how the proletariat and the intelligentsia came into being and how they changed over time. This is, indeed, an important question (see chapter ), but it requires background; hence my prior focus on what the proletariat and the intelligentsia meant to a Marxist and how their encounters and the consequent birth of the messiah were conceptualized in Marxist discourse. Showing the sheer breadth of the myth’s scope and its total domination over the mind of revolutionaries, my discussion draws on the writings of unorthodox bedfellows—such as Berdiaev and Bogdanov—and of minor Bolshevik commentators of Angarov’s ilk. In this chapter, I move freely between heterogeneous Marxist texts, some written as early as the s, others as late as the s. Had Russian history in the narrow sense of the term been my subject matter this would have been an impermissible approach. 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

Such a (temporary) disregard for context is acceptable only because the basic structure of the Marxist myth remained the same throughout the period under study. Mythical language itself, and not the “objective reality” to which this language supposedly referred, ensured that the Russian intelligentsia and proletariat were inseparable throughout twentieth-century Russian history. Having postulated an alienated class savior, Marxist eschatology had also to posit a vehicle that would return this savior to true, messianic consciousness. The ostensibly backward conditions of turn-of-the-century Russia do not adequately explain how the native proletariat was emasculated and why the native intelligentsia turned authoritarian. The Russian proletariat never emancipated itself from the tutelage of the intelligentsia, because the proletariat needed this other entity to frame its consciousness. It is in the Gnostic concept of alienation and its Christian and Romantic transmutations that the origins of the notion of the intelligentsia’s tutelage over the proletariat should be sought. No amount of attention to the particular conditions of Russia can entirely explain the tenacity of the intelligentsia’s hold over the workers. Although the intelligentsia-proletariat link certainly took historically specific forms, its ultimate roots were mythical, not historical. For this reason, I shall examine the relations between the proletariat and the intelligentsia without close reference to concrete circumstances—be they political (the notorious lack of liberal institutions in Russia) or social (the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie and the concomitant revolutionary imperative given the intelligentsia to stand in its place)—that supposedly determined the genesis and development of this pivotal interrelation. The influence these factors had on the mind-set of the Russian intelligentsia was examined from a variety of perspectives in late nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary literature. A reexamination of these old questions would only entrap us within the revolutionary master narrative. Focusing my attention on the Marxist myth, as such, I seek instead to gain a perspective from which the premises of this master narrative can be studied. The Eschatological Significance of Capitalism

In driving history forward, two key mythical catastrophes—the Original Expropriation and the rise of capitalism—were highly significant from the point of view of Marxist eschatology. The former event created class society 

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and separated good (the exploited) from evil (the exploiters). The rise of capitalism separated nature from culture, instinct from consciousness, and instilled in man the self-awareness necessary to permit him to freely embrace the good. Capitalism set the stage for a dialectical resolution whereby the cleavage wrought by the Original Expropriation would be healed. Marx’s model here was the Romantic view of the historical process, which, in the words of Abrams, “consists in the loss of man’s original unity with himself (his primordial harmony of impulse and action) through the emergent awareness of an opposition and conflict between that ‘nature’ which is the substratum of his human nature (man’s natural instincts, desires, and compulsions which constitute the realm of ‘necessity’) and his subjective ‘reason’ (the capacity to distinguish alternative choices which are right or wrong) together with his subjective realm of ‘freedom’ (the capacity to choose what is right and reject what is wrong).” This two-dimensional fission between mind and outer nature (the result of the Original Expropriation) and between the mind and its own natural impulses (the separation between the producer and his means of production brought about by capitalism) was the very act that set history in motion, with the basic aim of ultimately closing the circle and canceling “all cognitive and moral separation and opposition in a restored and enduring unity.”⁶ Not by chance was man removed from the bliss of primitive communism and thrust onto the road of alienation and class struggle. Since freedom, in its Marxist-Hegelian sense, meant not the uncritical satisfaction of desires but conscious action, and since self-awareness assumed a separation between the knower and the known, the naive harmony of primitive man had to be unraveled before it could be re-created on a higher level at the End of History. “If Man was to develop,” wrote the Bolshevik cultural critic Anatolii Lunacharskii, “the original unmediated unity of the human animal had to be broken.” According to the Marxist publicist Vladimirskii, “the temporary, grueling separation of human faculties was necessary to allow Man to eventually experience his being not as elemental and blind but as free and spiritual. There was no other transition from blindness to consciousness, from the reign of flesh to the triumph of the spirit.” The Marxist philosopher Aleksandr Bogdanov completed this line of reasoning in writing that “while the future Communist society will be a reincarnation of Primitive Communism in some ways, it will also be unique due to its superior synthesis.”⁷ This point lay at the heart of Marx’s break with the thought of the 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

Enlightenment. Within eighteenth-century naturalistic philosophy, nature shows men what they would be if they fully obeyed their proper calling. Instead of comparing earth to heaven, Enlightenment philosophers compared existing cultures to what they believed to be the original, natural, and authentic state of humanity. For Marx, by contrast, the savage was not man but a beast. Real Man was he who transcended nature and became conscious of his essence.⁸ It is this critique of Enlightenment primitivism that informs the Russian Marxists’ rejection of syndicalism, anarchism, and similar doctrines of deliverance that would have had history run backward. Marxists of all stripes claimed that progress in the realm of production could be achieved only at the price of increased suffering. Engels said about Marx that his greatest service was “to prove that a concealed progress is taking place through the modern economic relations even when they are accompanied by frightful immediate consequences.” Here the work of “cunning reason” could be recognized—that driving principle of history that eventually resolves all the contradictions between progress in material development and the impoverishment of most of the population. The notion of rejecting modern techniques in order to eliminate modern conflicts was anathema to the Marxists because they believed such a program would reduce humanity to an animalistic state. The primitive producer—the artisan or the peasant—was in Marx’s eyes not dissimilar to the spider who works mechanically, without carrying any notion of the final product in his head. The precapitalist laborer, like any other creature in the animal kingdom, Marx argued, was born into a certain reality, which determined his needs and shaped his desires. To the extent that he had outside interests, they were external to his work activity. Precapitalist producers, Marxists believed, had not yet risen above nature; they were creatures bound and instinctual, not free and conscious. No wonder that Trotsky remarked, “peasants look like a flock of animals”; that Plekhanov dehumanized them—“hunched over, their hands and legs twisted, peasants resemble a flock of gorillas or orangutans”; that Lenin ridiculed the “stupor of the patriarchal peasant who,” having met modern production techniques, “believed he saw a strange enemy coming God knows from where to demolish all the foundations of village life.”⁹ Even though they lived in a society in which there were many peasants and artisans and the proletariat barely existed, Russian Marxists were adamant that the industrial working class—the class of the future, not the past—was 

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the only possible candidate for the role of messiah.¹⁰ The industrial machine “degraded the worker” by splitting humans in two. Yet, without such a machine, argued a Russian translation of an article by Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, “the integrated man [tselostnyi chelovek] of the future was impossible. This was precisely what syndicalists and anarchists of various types failed to understand. Having the advantage of being a complete producer whose like is absent from the civilized world, the savage was primitive because he worked with a stone alone, and consequently lacked consciousness.”¹¹ Aware of the “circuitous journey” man had to travel to become free, Marxists ridiculed the Populist suggestion that Russia should skip the capitalist stage on its way to Communism. Reassured that future happiness justifies present suffering and certain that no country could escape the “pitiless laws” of economic development, Russian Marxists accepted that capitalism had to run its course, “without ever shedding tears over the ‘painful paths’ of economic development.” This logic resembled Marx’s own eschatological interpretation of British colonial expansion: “The question is: Can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”¹² The economic forces in operation in India and Russia alike were mere servants of eschatology, sent to liberate the consciousness of the oppressed in those nations. “Insofar as he took his stand upon the evolutionary point of view and recognized the existence of various stages in History to which different values are to be assigned,” Marx, according to Nikolai Berdiaev, “set a high value upon the mission of Capitalism.”¹³ Sergei Bulgakov, also a Marxist when he wrote those lines, maintained that “Russia is rapidly coming to approximate Western Europe, losing those former characteristics that made it nothing but a crude country of peasants. Every new factory, every new industrial enterprise carries us forward, increasing the number of people capable of intellectual Europeanization.”¹⁴ The most outspoken among the early Russian Marxists, Petr Struve, “fully accepted the idea . . . that we were suffering not from the development of capitalism, but from its insufficient development. While the capitalist system, organized on the basis of the acquisitive instinct would ultimately be supplanted, we must recognize the historical role it played, as Marx himself had done when he sang a dithyrambic adoration of the historical mission of Capitalism.”¹⁵ Struve praised capitalism because it fostered “class consciousness.” Bulgakov, 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

who saw the benefits of capitalism as congruent with his “eschatological and ethical faith in the progress of man,” believed that capitalism was an indispensable engine of European culture, “which alone gives beauty to our lives.” Berdiaev reminisced that “what attracted me most of all about Marxism was its characteristic appreciation of the moving forces below the surface of history, its consciousness of the historic hour, its broad historical perspectives and its universalism.” Also appealing was “the prospect of a spiritual revolution: a rising of the spirit, of freedom and meaning against the deadly weight, the slavery and meaninglessness of the world.”¹⁶ In a word, the Russian Marxists perceived capitalism as salvational. They accepted the suffering it inflicted on man for the sake of the resulting enlightenment. The effects of capitalism were “dialectical”: tearing man from the immediacy of his vocation, capitalism gave him a chance to transgress his specific, limited predicament and to rise to universalism. Capitalism taught the worker that he was the only animating spark in the world, the only creative, self-propelling entity. “By driving labor beyond its natural paltriness, this mode of production,” according to Marx, “replaces natural necessity with historically created needs . . . creating the material elements needed for rich individuality.”¹⁷ Not that the Russian Marxists did not lament the segregation of the world of thought and the world of work: “How distant became the forms of life of mental and manual laborers! Laboratories, cabinets, and libraries seem for the workers to be a domain lying far away, obscure and misunderstood; conversely, the clamor of the industrial machines . . . reaches the thinker muffled by the high walls of the intellectual abode.”¹⁸ In the same vein, Bogdanov regretted the “lack of a physical component in the life of the thinker—what a deformity, the human organism is designed for physical activity!—and the concomitant lack of the spiritual aspect in the lives of the workers.”¹⁹ But capitalism impelled humanity to think on a global scale for the first time, precisely because it went beyond the natural and exclusive bind between the peasant and his plot, between the artisan and his tools, and developed relations between the producer and a much wider range of consumers. The capitalist world-embracing economy prompted the development of a world-embracing consciousness making a crucial contribution toward the resolution of history. The Marxist myth accepted that the immediate impact of capitalism was injurious. Just emancipated from the bonds of instinct, humanity was hurried into the new bondage of capital. An abstract and impersonal force, capital

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ism urged men to produce and consume at an ever faster rate, imprisoning humanity in a circle of meaningless activity. This situation was destined to be reversed, however. Marx declared that, while perfecting itself, capitalism inadvertently but inexorably produced the messianic forces that were to bring about its own demise. Not only would capitalism have “forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it would call into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—its own gravediggers.”²⁰ The Proletariat: The Class Messiah

In his early years Marx thought that critical philosophy alone could bring about salvation, but once he had come to the conclusion that particularist consciousness, the great hindrance to salvation, was derived from a material source (private property), he knew that reason alone could not ensure the triumph of universalism. Realizing that emancipation required not only an idea but also a material force to embody it, Marx confronted the problem of power: “The weapon of criticism is no substitute for criticism by weapons: material force must be opposed by material force.” Or, in a no less famous phrase: “Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force.” Emancipation, Marx now realized, could be brought about only if a salvational message “gripped the masses,” that is, became a popular force. Universalist philosophy needed a lever, an agent who would convey reason and universalist consciousness to the living world. The task of serving as the leverage of human emancipation was to fall to the “proletariat.”²¹ The struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie was declared to be the motor of the historical process. “Placed in the very center of production, in the center of society, the proletariat bears the capitalist world on its shoulders,” a Russian émigré journal resoundingly declared. “It is the historical mission of the proletariat to destroy capitalism and build socialism.” Berdiaev maintained that the proletariat was the “active agent that frees humanity from slavery. . . . To it are ascribed messianic attributes, to it are transferred the attributes of the chosen people of God.”²² The Marxist myth selected the proletariat to this lofty task for its unique ethical qualities. Generally, the Marxists argued, ethics was a cover-up for class interests: “Ethics and morality indirectly reflect the interests of the ruling class. . . . What is ‘good for this class’ [klassovo-polezno] is ‘good,’ what is 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

‘bad for this class’ [klassovo-vredno] is ‘bad.’ ”²³ But in the face of the proletariat there was a class with no property to defend for the first time in history. Its radical separation from the means of production, the source of all economic interest, put the proletariat in an unprecedented ethical position. Acting disinterestedly, the proletariat was truly good. When Marx posited the proletariat’s deprivation as the source of its moral strength, he was reprising the Christian principle, “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first” (Matthew :). No wonder that Vasil’ev, a Marxist essayist, rephrased the ten commandments in such a way that they would fit the proletariat’s salvational task: () Bear in mind that you are poor and that all the poor are your brothers. () Sell not your soul to the capitalists who buy your body and the body of your brothers. () Remember that the poor are many and the rich are few, realize that victory is hard but that a brim of light is bound to reach your brothers and sisters who are shrouded in darkness. () Enlighten yourself and your brothers and sisters. () Be ready to sacrifice your soul for the sake of your brothers and sisters. () Bring together your brothers and sisters in unions. . . . () Teach through personal example, forget your “I,” remember our holy mission [sviatoe delo]. () Move toward one goal—socialism, that is, a free society where everyone is working. . . . () Remember the first steps: organization, enlightenment, self-education. . . . () Remember that the mission to emancipate the people can be carried out only by the conscious people united in one, large army.

The metaphysical redeemer naturally became an object of veneration. Lunacharskii declared the proletariat to be God; Alexandra Kollontai, a leading Bolshevik feminist, wrote that “we overthrow the former gods in order to set up in their place our deity.” Scarcely representing a degeneration of a scientific doctrine into a cult, these Marxist “God-builders” (bogostroiteli) gave a particularly poignant expression to the proletariat’s eschatological significance.²⁴ 

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The proletariat—justice incarnate—in the words of Lunacharskii, “is heir to the idealist German philosophy and the executor of the last will of all those who fell in the struggle for the broad, bright and powerful human life.” Having articulated a view of socialism as “the religion of humanity,” Lunacharskii saw Christ as a leader of the proletarian masses of Galilee, and early Christianity—this apocalyptic revolt of the propertyless classes against Roman authority—as a forerunner of revolutionary Marxism. Maxim Gorky, a borderline Marxist figure at the time, concurred: “At various times various people believed themselves to be messiahs called to save the world. . . . Now History has bestowed this mission on the Russian working class—a great experiment that was edifying to the rest of the world.”²⁵ Moral superiority alone was not enough, however, to transform the proletariat into the messiah. Awareness of the mission was required as well. In society, defined by Marx as “a collection of theoretical interests,” progress amounted to the “elimination of impediments to knowledge through education in the universal interest.” The proletariat had to annul the particularity of different viewpoints and elevate society to global consciousness. What was at stake was messianic epistemology. According to Marx, economic motivations tended to form a distorting lens between knower and known, between class and the objective reality before it. The refraction of reality varied in accordance with the specific interest of a given class. Bogdanov explained that “while from the bourgeois perspective many things could not be seen . . . as soon as Marx changed perspective and gazed at society from the point of view of the working class everything appeared different.” Because the bourgeois (in the context of class epistemology the “bourgeoisie” included artisans, peasants, and all other property owners) extracted surplus labor from producers, their perception of reality was distorted by economic interest. According to the Marxist Chetkov, “only the class that exploits no one, the class that strives to abolish all exploitation in society, was capable of a strictly scientific understanding of reality”; “only those initiated into the proletariat could embrace the Marxist, dispassionate outlook. An unprepared individual tended to question objective truths.”²⁶ Scientifically equipped, workers were aware of the central contradiction of capitalism, namely universal participation in a network of class relations. Martyn Liadov, a Bolshevik of long standing, elucidated the link between industrial labor and class consciousness: “The large factory and the mill destroy the spirit of individualism. Every particle produced passes through 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

hundreds of hands: ‘We create,’ ‘We produce,’ says the worker; life itself whispers in his ear that only by a collective effort he can gain freedom.” “Does knowledge serve proletarians as a personal weapon in the battle for success? as a means to improving his lot?” “No, proletarian knowledge is the weapon not of an individual but of a collective.” According to the Bolshevik literary critic Vatsliv Vorovskii, this remained so “even if at first workers mistrusted one other. Identical life conditions gradually erode their isolationism, create a unitary perception of things and allow them to understand that their interests and tasks were common.”²⁷ According to the Russian Marxists, no precapitalist class was classconscious: the ancient oligarchs thought they were God’s servitor; feudal knights believed they were members of a juridical estate; capitalists prided themselves on individual entrepreneurial skills, supposedly their unique, personal gifts. By contrast, the proletariat rejected ideologies offering an alternative identity, whether religious, national, or occupational, and became the first agent in history to adopt class analysis. Their objective conditions of existence demonstrated to the workers that they formed a class and not an aggregate of individuals with contradictory interests and viewpoints. What was important here was that this epistemological breakthrough happened necessarily and collectively, not individually and accidentally. Recast in terms of the eschatological narrative, the position of the proletariat in capitalist production erased in the proletarian mind the disparity between universalist and particularist knowledge. “The central aim of the proletariat,” maintained Bogdanov, “was to destroy the external constraints that limit its existence and to turn itself from a part of society into its entirety.”²⁸ Still, the tension between particularism and universalism in the Marxist notion of the proletariat could not simply disappear. Having established that the proletariat was the only class capable of undistorted cognition, was Marx within his rights to conclude that the proletariat was a universalist messiah? Had not he himself claimed that “classes” were by definition particularist forces? Once aware of its collective interest, the proletariat might well develop an antagonistic attitude toward all other classes. The superior proletarian epistemology might be put to use as a weapon, enabling the proletariat to enserf the rest of humanity rather than to emancipate it. The late nineteenthcentury Western European Marxists believed that capitalism pushed ever more individuals into the ranks of the proletariat, effectively eliminating the middle classes. Since in this scenario the proletariat gradually expanded to 

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embrace all humanity, proletarian knowledge could be expected to have transcended all class boundaries and become all-embracing. This argument was not without problems, however. The worldwide spread of proletariat consciousness did not have to be interpreted as the emancipation of humankind. To say that numerical preponderance automatically entails ethical superiority was to confuse might with right, the view of the accidental majority with the ethical truth. Although the poor were always many and the rich few, Marx privileged not the poor in general but the proletariat specifically, independently of the workers’ weight in society. In the context of late nineteenth-century Russia, with its meager industrial workforce, for example, Marxists could not even think of justifying their fixation on the proletariat in terms of its majority position.²⁹ Yet no Marxists would even consider an alternative messiah. The Russian Marxists did not speak in the name of the native workers but in the name of a proletarian messianic mission. “Sooner or later,” they confidently stated, “our working class will embrace the socialist program. The conscious workers cannot be anything but socialists.” The proletarian eschatological mission clearly preceded the formation of the Russian proletariat itself. For Iurii Martov, the proletariat was an icon, a bound Prometheus who had to be released “so that it would tear the fate of the Russian people out of the claws of the two-headed bird of prey. Only the workers of Russia, the most righteous slaves of the tsar, can deliver all classes of the population from oppression.”³⁰ It was not the case that Communism was advocated in Russia because it expressed the actual wishes of the countable native workers. Rather, the Russian working class was sanctified by the Russian Marxists because in their eyes it carried the idea of redemption. The proletariat’s numerical insignificance in Russia only emphasized its eschatological magnificence. Knowing well that the Russian working class comprised less than  percent of the population in , Pavel Aksel’rod, one of the founders of Russian Social Democracy and Marxism, stated that “at the present time the industrial proletariat is the most conscious and the most fervent pioneer of the lofty ideals common to all mankind, ideals which render the labor movement the embodiment of the conscious aspirations of our epoch to a transition to a higher stage of civilization.”³¹ The law that generated the Russian proletariat was teleological, not causal; not the interaction of social forces but the logic of the metahistory summoned the proletariat into being. The proletariat was “a unique class,” the only class 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

that could set the enormous task of human emancipation on its shoulders, stated the Bolshevik writer Angarov, because the proletariat alone satisfied all the following conditions demanded of the world redeemer: First, such a class should not own the means of production. Lack of desire to abolish private property will lead to the substitution of one set of exploiters by another. . . . Second, this class must be the most exploited of all, a class that “enjoyed” all the marvels of exploitation. Third, it must be the most organized and disciplined of all classes—the struggle against exploiters demands unity. . . . Fourth, this has to be a class concentrated in a few key locations across the country. Dispersal and fragmentation weaken any class. . . . Fifth, this has to be a conscious, developed class. . . . A program is needed to unify the exploited and express their interests. A class must not only do, but must also understand what it does.³²

The Marxist myth elevated the proletariat to its lofty status because in its “essence” (sushchnost’) it was “universalist” (vsechelovecheskii). Since in the positivist framework the proletariat is a social class, no more and no less, the social historian is helpless before such terminology. But for a Marxist mythmaker, the proletariat was both more and less than a class, less than a class because “a pure negativity”; more than a class because not a “class among classes” but the class savior. The Marxist notion of history as a specifically redemptive process explains what made the proletariat so unique.³³ In the early philosophical manuscripts of the s, Marx described the proletariat as “not the naturally arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society, but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society.” The proletarians were those excluded from “the true community of men” and thus deprived of their human nature. According to Marx, “the disastrous isolation from this essential nature is incomparably more universal, more intolerable, more dreadful, and more contradictory, than mere isolation from the political community. Hence, too, the abolition of this isolation—even a partial reaction to it, an uprising against it—is just as much more infinite.” Therefore, the uprising of industrial workers, a qualitatively new event on the historical scene, contained within itself what Marx called the “universal soul”—a mythoreligious concept through and through.³⁴ Drawing almost verbatim on the early Marx, the Russian philosopher Vol’skii elaborated: 

        -           The proletariat is a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of estates. . . . It has no privileges it would cherish, no rights it would regret losing, no benefits it would hesitate to forsake. For the proletariat, participation in class society is a curse, not a joy. While all other classes see their historical task in self-assertion, the proletariat aspires to self-destruction. . . . The proletariat has a universal character due to its universal suffering. It claims no particular right because not a particular but a general wrong is perpetrated against it. . . . Not an aim in itself but a transitional entity, the proletariat is a purifying fire. It is a class that struggles to abolish classes—its existence is nothing but a tool for the emancipation of humanity.

What this meant was that the relationship between proletariat and society was symbolic. The proletariat was a symbol of society because the structure of the whole (alienated capitalist society) was present in the part (the dehumanized proletariat). Following Leonard Wessell’s analysis, we can say that society was utterly demeaned, insulted, and defiled in the part. Such a similarity or “representative nexus” was simultaneously a “causal link,” which transformed the part into the whole, “albeit only momentarily.”³⁵ Its symbolic weight allowed the proletariat to represent the ethical content of society as a whole. The emancipating class was regarded as a negative representative of society. Wronged in an unqualified way, the proletariat could have no interest except that of a pure negation: “Indeed, the very negativity of the proletariat makes it representative of the whole.” In Marx’s own terms, no class could attempt to bring about “universal human emancipation . . . without calling forth a moment of enthusiasm in itself [the class] and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternizes and flows together with society in general, in which it is combined with [the social whole] and is felt and acknowledged [to be its] general representative, a moment in which its claims and rights are in truth the rights and claims of society itself, in which it is actually the social head and the social heart.”³⁶ On the eschatological-redemptive plane, universality was recovered through the proletariat’s unrelieved, extreme suffering. “Toilers” from Ekaterinburg stated in  with a typical pathos: “the machines in our factories are showered with our sweat and blood.” This gave them the title to consider themselves the saviors of mankind. “Once awakened,” Liadov proudly proclaimed, “the workers’ mass is ready to endure extreme suffering [velichaishie muki] in defending its rightful beliefs.” Mirce Eliade elucidates the mythical attitude to the reality of suffering: “Every moment of the magico-religious treatment 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

of suffering most clearly illustrates its meaning: the primitive—and not the primitive alone—cannot conceive of unprovoked suffering. . . . There is always a fault at the bottom of it. . . . Individual or a collective suffering always has its explanation. And consequently, it is, it can be, tolerable.” Experiencing unqualified negation, the proletariat possessed unqualified innocence; the negative incarnation of humanity, dialectically negating the negation of humanity, it was in a unique position to become the redeemer of humanity.³⁷ An entity capable of absolute suffering, the proletariat turned into that force sought by Marx to propel consciousness into self-actualization. As the “heart of future history,” the proletariat linked up with Marx’s philosophy, which became “its brain.” The heart was the concrete and particular. The brain was the universal. Ludwig Feuerbach, a seminal influence on Marx, characterized the nonabstract element that bears the universality of reason as a “suffering heart” (in contrast to the “head” of abstract philosophy): “Only what can suffer deserves to exist. Only the entity rich in pain is a divine entity. An essence without suffering is . . . an entity devoid of sensibility, devoid of matter.” Embodying this logic, Russian workers professed to have been successful in uniting thinking with feeling: “You cannot expunge the sentiment of unity from our hearts or consciousness from our minds, you cannot change the shape of our human soul [chelovecheskaia dusha].”³⁸ Suffering alone was insufficient, however. Only mythological suffering, such as that endured by the proletariat, was, in Wessell’s precise terminology, “salvationally efficacious.” Consider the terms with which Latvian workers greeted their striking Peterburgian comrades: “Let your hearts warm up . . . for, afflicted as you are with cold, hunger and various other kinds of suffering, you expiate [iskupat’] our sacred mission [sviatoe delo].” Mythological suffering alone was capable of transubstantiating the part into the whole. Thus, the relationship of a part for a whole (to cite Wessell again) was a “relationship of representing or, better, re-presenting the whole in the parts.” A symbolic causality was thereby introduced into an otherwise mechanistically regulated process of material events. The proletariat is the vehicle of emancipation “because it is totally ‘separated’ from the uncleanliness of corrupt society. The proletariat is not of society (i.e., it does not participate in societal crime), yet it is in society (i.e., it is a victim of society’s ‘notorious crime’). Consequently, the proletariat is the sacrificial lamb.” This act of sacrifice justified, in the discourse of the Russian Marxists, the transformation of the part (proletariat as a class) into the whole (proletariat as humanity).³⁹ The Marxist activist Krzhizhanovskii wrote in  that “the Russian 

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worker is ready to make whatever sacrifices are needed . . . in order to recover his human image.” Other Social Democratic leaders were likewise astonished at the “eagerness” with which workers “sacrifice themselves.” Indeed, the ultimate sacrifice, death (which would have deterred any materially driven agent), did not discourage the Russian proletariat. “Comrades,” a speaker addressed a workers’ audience in , “it is better to die than live the way we lived heretofore!” and the audience loudly replied, “Let us die.” The speaker asked, “And what about those who swear they will die today, but who retract their promises tomorrow?” to which the audience replied, “Damnation.”⁴⁰ Whereas somebody like Hegel sought a continuing historical and logical relationship of universality and particularity and believed that bureaucracy could mediate between the particular (the citizen) and the general (the state), Marx and his Russian followers sought a class that would destroy particularity, transcending its own particular being in the process. According to this scenario, the proletariat was a material force of a special kind, one that strove to cease being a force altogether (“force” in Marxism meant the force of one class over another, a relic of the primordial sin of the Original Expropriation). At first, workers were to appear on the Russian scene as tangible creatures with concrete socioeconomic needs and demands. But this could be said of any social group. What made the workers special was that their needs, both material and spiritual, had no reality, no fulfillment in the capitalist social structure.⁴¹ Thus the Russian proletariat was the only social force that strove not for power but for transcendence. A political agent seeking an end to all politics, the proletariat aimed to relieve society of the power dimension. Inaugurating a classless society, the proletariat was to be consumed in the act of selfsacrifice. Chetkov, a Bolshevik class theorist, asserted that, “upon turning consciousness into a universal property, the proletariat will joyfully cross itself out from the book of life. With Communism, a new, classless human history will commence.” In the same vein Lenin noted that it was imprecise to say the proletariat would inherit the earth after the Revolution: “When the proletariat emerges victorious, it will not thereby have turned into the absolute element in society; for it will be victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then both the proletariat and its conditioned opposite, private property, will have disappeared.”⁴²



The Janus-Faced Messiah

The Intelligentsia: Bearer of Proletarian Consciousness

A fundamental assumption of the Marxist myth was that capitalism led to redemption dialectically, through incessant self-contradiction, and produced the proletariat—the morally pure class-messiah with no stake in the preservation of capitalism, the only class capable of universal cognition. But capitalism also kept the proletariat-messiah in the dark, chained to the machine and objectified. Limited to a single function in a line of production, maintained Lunacharskii, the worker was a pale shadow of his messianic self. The automatization of labor and the dehumanization of the working class under capitalism informed Lenin’s doubts that a worker’s movement could spontaneously engender revolutionary consciousness. Trotsky claimed that the factory “drills workers into the submissiveness of barracks life.” Bogdanov added that “physical labor and preoccupation with subsistence completely stifle workers’ creativity.” Its mind degraded, how was the proletariat able to learn the lines assigned it in the script of history? Marx was aware that unlike Athena springing forth from the brow of Zeus the class-messiah was not born into capitalism in full armor but had to be “educated” first. The German term Marx used here—“Bildung”—connoting both “education” and “formation,” invoked the Hegelian account of Bildung as the progression from particularist immediacy to the universalist determination.⁴³ Somewhat surreptitiously, the Marxist myth split the agent of salvation into two parts: a material body—the proletariat—and an unspecified “educator,” the temporary bearer of proletarian consciousness. The mission of the intelligentsia, shaped after the Gnostic messenger, was to alert man to his divine origins. Giving birth to a handicapped and obtuse proletariat, the thoughtful eschatological providence did not fail to produce the proletariat’s intelligentsia tutor. The fusion of the proletariat and intelligentsia components of the messiah was inscribed in the Marxist notion of emancipation. The unified subject could not exist in history, the self-division of man being the epitome of the alienated human condition. Such unification was instead promised as the result of history, the best indication that history had been transcended and Communism realized. Marxist theorists explained that the proletariat and the intelligentsia were twin offspring of capitalism: “Large-scale capitalism drove a chasm between work and thought, two functions heretofore intimately linked”; “the separation of mental and manual labor is the basis for the capitalist social division



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of labor. Manual labor is forced on the shoulders of one class and mental labor becomes a privilege of another.” The existence of the intelligentsia and of the proletariat was made possible by the disappearance of the artisan whose labor and thought were fused into a primitive unity. Both classes were invested with important functions: “On the one hand, capitalism enslaved manual laborers to the machine, and on the other hand it set intellectual laborers the task of organizing the production process.”⁴⁴ It appeared at first that the intelligentsia, placed as it was on the wrong side of the class divide, was unfit for the all-important eschatological task of “educating” the class-messiah. Providing the intelligentsia a small share of its revenues, the bourgeoisie bought off its property—knowledge—no less contested an item than surplus value. Trained to utilize natural resources in the most efficient way, the intelligentsia helped capitalism maximize exploitation, keep the proletariat in darkness, and forestall rebellion. Busy manufacturing ideological justifications for capitalism, the intelligentsia was instrumentalist and selfish. Dwelling on the negative application of its knowledge, the Marxist social scientist Mikhail Reisner implied that, from the perspective of salvation, the mind of the intelligentsia appeared as obtuse as the mind of the proletariat. “Working for the market . . . the intelligentsia renounces personal sympathies, convictions and independent views, and fills its head with notions that serve the exploiter. Employing the intelligentsia as a cultural superstructure supervising the production base capitalism turns professionals of mental labor into the material of a colossal, breathing machine in which minds, characters and sensitivities are fabricated in accordance with the needs of production.”⁴⁵ What was worse was that the intelligentsia, as Bogdanov observed, often misused its gift of knowledge, indulging instead in vain self-aggrandizement: “Considering its larger-than-life truths unavailable to the benighted masses, the intelligentsia deems itself the elect, marked by the stamp of a nobility of mind.” It acted condescendingly toward the proletariat: “Below it, the intelligentsia believes, lower creatures crawl about, enchained by crude labor and subsistence worries. Should these creatures not be proud to work for the men of elevated spirit, grateful for the crumbs thrown to them from above?” And Lunacharskii regretted to note, “In the name of the ‘sacred and eternal rights of men’ it has inscribed on its banner, the intelligentsia sinks into unnatural, individualistic depravity. . . . Self-absorbed, demanding ‘absolute freedom from society,’ the intelligentsia systematically falls short of proletar

The Janus-Faced Messiah

ian collectivism.”⁴⁶ According to Viacheslav Polonskii, a commentator sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, “the intelligentsia does not realize its ideas are conditioned by the social system. Walking about in the hanging garden of ideological abstractions, it remains severed from reality. From its mind sprang forth the notion that its thinking processes are subjected to independent immanent law, remaining free from all social determination.”⁴⁷ All this being said, the intelligentsia was still endowed with features indispensable for bringing consciousness to the proletariat. Its organizational tasks instilled the intelligentsia with a sense of self endowed with a creative impulse that was painfully absent in the workers. Presiding over the production process, the intelligentsia ran capitalist economy, not the reverse. Thriving on the universalization of knowledge and its emancipation from work, the intelligentsia was capable of reflexivity—a prerequisite for any original thinking. The Russian Marxists valued a great deal the intelligentsia’s “personality” (lichnost’)—a characteristic that allowed men to resist elemental drives in the name of reason. “Personality” was that self-igniting mechanism which, in the words of Lunacharskii, made humans free: “Its emancipation by the intelligentsia represented an all-important landmark in human progress permitting men to break away from the rhythm of nature and become its masters.”⁴⁸ The Marxist sociologist of literature Pavel Sakulin attributed to the intelligentsia “maximal freedom of thought. The indeterminate aspect of human life reveals itself in the intelligentsia’s . . . capacity for self-activating creativity.”⁴⁹ Here lay the ultimate irony of the capitalist dialectic: the eschatological agents produced by capitalism were self-contradictory and woefully incomplete. Having emancipated knowledge from the immediacy of its application, having created conditions for the liberation of labor, capitalism dehumanized both the proletariat and the intelligentsia. Knowledgeable, the intelligentsia harnessed its insights to the avaricious demands of the bourgeoisie; virtuous, the worker was deprived of salvational knowledge. “The same economic process that blunted the mind of the proletariat, consigning him to a purely physical labor, also degraded the intelligentsia, condemning it to be . . . a pitiful breed that gives birth to an even more pitiful posterity.”⁵⁰ To gain consciousness, the proletariat had to transform the intelligentsia’s knowledge from a tool of bondage into a tool of emancipation. The catalyst for the proletarian capacity for freedom resided in the intelligentsia’s spirituality. Rejecting anti-intellectualism and primitivism, the Marxists set out to 

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inject the proletariat with a sense of self. Reisner, whom we have just seen lashing out against the intelligentsia’s sense of self-importance, was nevertheless convinced that the sense of self had to be salvaged if the proletarian animalistic herd instinct was to be countered. “One of our greatest tasks is to turn workers into conscious personalities, into historical actors, in their own right.” For the pedagogue Makarov, the true proletarian was “not a contemplative, egotistical and self-absorbed individual produced by the old educational system, but an active individual with an intense will. The human ‘we’ and the human ‘I’ have to be harmonized without shattering personality. Only then will the collective benefit from the inherent capabilities of its members.” Lunacharskii, too, rejected constraints upon the individual’s creativity. He preferred “macropsychic or broad-souled individualism,” not to be confused with “micropsychic individualism,” and hoped that a macropsychic individual would be impelled away from an egotistic worldview and toward a universalist one. The proletarian personality, Lunacharskii proclaimed, would be capable of mediating the individual and the collective will.⁵¹ The Marxist myth posited that the proletarian could be endowed with a personality that would transcend the consciousness of the individual self while remaining immune to the intelligentsia’s delusion of individual omnipotence. On the strength of what he believed was Marx’s “poignant definition of the gradations of proletarian consciousness,” Vol’skii wrote that the proletariat existed first as a “class in itself” in a “spontaneous,” “unreflective” state. At this stage, the proletariat “had only blind power at its disposal. . . . It was unaware of the aims it had to accomplish.” Only the formation of “personality” within the proletariat could usher in its transformation into a class “for itself.” It was through the notion of “proletarian personality” that Vol’skii sought to reconcile the determinist notion of history with messianic voluntarism: The proletarian personality forms in tandem with the formation of proletarian class consciousness; it becomes the center of gravity which consolidates proletarian identity. . . . Once the confines of everyday activity are transcended, the eternal sphinx of the proud human “I” can finally emerge from the ashes of old cocoons. . . . Once the fire of social contradictions reduces to cinders all traditional superstitions, the free human “I” can set itself goals that lie beyond immediacy. Sooner or later, the worker is bound to ask himself: “In what relation do I stand to my class taken as a whole?” “How do I fit into the particular class politics of the proletariat?” . . . drawing a new circle, the epicenter of which is the personality of the worker in all its specificity and originality. . . . Having observed the collective labor of the 

The Janus-Faced Messiah entire class, the worker will say to himself: “the class struggle is the sphere where my ‘I’ is best expressed. My personal joys and my personal sufferings are worthless trifles in comparison with the grandiose perspectives of universal emancipation.” Striving for social harmony and monism, the worker will eventually erase all boundaries between the “Me” and the “You.”

The worker’s sacrifice of his individual self for the sake of his class affirmed, in this analysis, the value of proletarian personality. Having finally obtained a clear sense of identity, the class-messiah thus became a free and self-animating agency that could reverse history. But the issue was hardly exhausted at that: we have so far heard more about the proletariat’s need for personality than about how exactly this personality was to be attained. Even Vol’skii had to admit that “the proletarian, as constituted by History, was not a law giver but only a destructive force.” The appearance of a sense of individuality in the proletarian was to take place only after the Revolution.⁵² The talk about “individual sense of class consciousness” (Reisner), the “ ‘I’ in the ‘We’ ” (Makarov), and the “fusion of the individual and the collective” (Lunacharskii), all posited the proletariat’s leap to the “for-itself ” mode of its existence, deus ex machina. Let us take a closer look at this myth of self-generation: Russian Marxists succeeded in mapping out the trajectory of proletarian self-enlightenment. The primary stage assumed nothing beyond basic existence; the worker did not know himself to be the messiah and was unaware that the relations of production were not a law of nature. Negating everything that was not itself, the self-estranged worker was unconscious of himself. At the next stage, the working class was supposed to mediate itself to itself, that is, it had to oppose itself to itself and reflect its essence on itself in order to recognize itself as the messiah—and here lies the main difficulty.⁵³ The element of mediation had unexpected implications for the messianic argument, however, for the act of mediation turned, even if only for a moment, the self-alienated proletariat into its own object. The homogeneity of the proletariat was thus nullified and its messianic purity annulled. Indeed, the process of the proletariat’s mediation of itself to itself introduced the requisite sense of self-awareness and supplied the proletariat with the coveted personality. But the same process also introduced a moment of otherness into the class-messiah, thereby undermining its autonomy and self-sufficiency. Although not always spelled out explicitly, this consequence 

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was crucial for the characterization of the Marxist eschatological agency, for the intelligentsia emerged at the heart of the proletariat. The proletariat’s mysterious “educator,” the intelligentsia, had always to be there for the proletariat, to hold the mirror in which the proletariat could recognize itself as itself. A special gift of the intelligentsia was to know what the proletariat really was. History, Karl Kautsky explained, “endowed the intelligentsia with an intellectual capacity superior to that of the proletariat.”⁵⁴ Or, in the words of Sakulin, “the intelligentsia’s capacity to inject freedom into necessity was what made it into the educator of the proletariat.”⁵⁵ This is why it was so important that the intelligentsia had a personality— without this key attribute of the intelligentsia, the reversal of the proletariat’s intellectual career would not be possible. The medium through which freedom was returned to man, the intelligentsia was a companion of the proletariat in the eschatological venture. Lev Kleinbort, a prominent Social Democratic publicist, noted: “Our intelligentsia always understood the misery and suffering of the toilers with its brains but could not feel it with its heart. . . . The toilers, conversely, lived their suffering but could not understand that without intellectual development they can gain no life nor selfexpression. . . . The intelligentsia’s capacity to think is at least as important as the workers’ capacity to feel.” The Marxist messiah was configured as a double-headed Janus: “The proletariat cannot close the door to the intelligentsia without forfeiting its cause,” explained Lunacharskii. “Nor can the intelligentsia exist outside the magnificent stream of the proletarian universal movement.”⁵⁶ The intelligentsia was the one historically minded agent that knew events had a meaning that could be systematically studied, the agent destined to point the way toward the general emancipation of humanity.⁵⁷ Lenin quoted the “profoundly correct formulation by Kautsky to the effect that the vehicle of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia. It was in the minds of the individual members of this stratum that modern socialist consciousness originated.” The intelligentsia, according to Aksel’rod, had “to express the proletariat’s amorphous and unconscious aspirations”; in the words of Zorin, a little-known Marxist columnist, it had “to enable the proletariat to go to battle with full consciousness of its goals”; and according to Gurevich, another minor Marxist, it had “to teach the proletariat to look beyond the immediacy of its existence, to be its spiritual guide, the midwife to its thought.”⁵⁸ 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

The duality of the intelligentsia’s identity—proletarian oppressor in some manifestations, proletarian educator in others—prompted Marxists to separate the true intelligentsia from the intelligentsia residue, variously described as “pseudo-intelligentsia” (lzhe-intelligentsiia), “privileged intelligentsia,” “bourgeois intelligentsia,” “philistine intelligentsia,” “certificated intelligentsia” (diplomirovannaia intelligentsiia), “spiritually bankrupt intelligentsia” (intelligenty-bankroty dukha), and the “older sister who betrayed the precepts of the true intelligentsia.”⁵⁹ Promoting the spirit of freedom and using knowledge as a vehicle for emancipation, the “true intelligentsia” (nastoiashchaiia intelligentsiia) was irreducible to a cabal of “intellectuals”—that conformist capitalist chattel which utilized knowledge to perpetuate the existing social system, a despicable caste of thinking machines programmed by an outside agency to serve any master. Only the true intelligentsia, endowed with an ethical commitment to emancipation, could ignite a sense of class consciousness in the proletariat.⁶⁰ In the words of Fedor Dan, “intelligentsia does not refer to a professional group but to a special social group united by a certain political solidarity. . . . Even the most learned and educated people, wholly preoccupied by intellectual work, stand outside this group, if they are reactionary.”⁶¹ The distinction made by Hans Jonas between the Gnostic pneuma (the “spirit”) and the Greek psyche (the “soul”) might be applied here to separate the messianic “intelligentsia” from “professionals who work with their heads.” Instilled in man, pneuma was the source of the divine inspiration that called on the Gnostics to overcome the world. By contrast, the psyche was the subjective component of human existence, which, according to Greek thought, had to be brought into accord with the world to achieve harmony. Celebrating human intelligence in the world, the Greeks were careful not to emancipate the intellect from the world: the psyche abided by the world’s universal order, the nomos, and had no desire to transgress this order. Marx believed that the time had come to abandon the psychelike attitude to the world, which only helped uphold the order of economic regularities that held humanity in bondage. What had to come instead was a pneuma-inspired attitude of shaping the world freely. The same thing that was said of the Gnostics could be said of the Marxist intelligentsia: “They deny every objective norm of conduct. Freedom of the soul is obedience to your divine self, not the structure of the universe.”⁶² On occasion, Marxists themselves pointed to the plurality of meanings they 

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assigned to the intelligentsia: bourgeois mental laborers at times, the custodians of proletarian consciousness at others. In the mind of the Social Democratic publicist Vladimir Posse (Novgorodtsev), an episode from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex captured this sort of confusion most wonderfully. Both savior and mastermind of exploitation, the intelligentsia was the creature alluded to in the Sphinx’s riddle, he claimed. In Posse’s version of the old tale, Oedipus was a proletarian hero. When the Sphinx asked him who it was that walked on two, three, and four legs Oedipus responded: “the intelligentsia, of course! A part of it grovels in front of the bourgeoisie on all fours, another part toddles at the proletariat’s tail, and only the third part walks firmly and courageously on both legs.” The challenge before the workers was “not to confuse the four-legged creature with the two-legged one”—the true bearer of proletarian consciousness.⁶³ It was not too difficult to identify the two-legged intelligentsia—all the proletariat had to do was to look at the content of its activism rather than the form. Since the Marxist intelligentsia alone recognized the proletariat as the sole messiah, the Marxist intelligentsia was the sole repository of salvational knowledge. Explaining that “the strength of the proletariat . . . depends on the clarity of its consciousness,” the “father” of Russian Marxism, George Plekhanov, assumed that consciousness could be achieved through the influence of “our own, socialist intelligentsia alone.” Temporarily separated from the body of the proletariat, the Marxist intelligentsia was united with the proletariat’s essence. Potresov elaborated: On the one hand, our intelligentsia is self-contained; on the other, it exists only insofar as it conducts its struggle in the name of the proletarian mass. Only when the intelligentsia models its consciousness on the mass does it find its true self. The dispersed, isolated splinters of the intelligentsia pull together. What had until now been a skeleton gathers flesh, and the spirit of revolutionary defiance replaces in the intelligentsia the languor of contemplation.

The proletariat, in order to become a class “for itself,” had to entrust itself to the intelligentsia’s tutelage, whereas the intelligentsia had to realize that the proletariat was the measure of all knowledge. “The intelligentsia cannot find a firm ethical basis in itself,” Trotsky maintained. “It has to seek it elsewhere —in the proletariat.”⁶⁴ All other “truths” were merely conventions of class interest—an insight that explained the contempt of the Russian Marxist toward a value-free, purely cerebral expertise.⁶⁵ The proletariat and the intelli

The Janus-Faced Messiah

gentsia were linked by “truth” in the epistemological sense (pravda-istina), an embodiment of Marxist intelligentsia knowledge, and “truth” in the moral sense (pravda-spravedlivost’), an embodiment of proletarian virtue.⁶⁶ While slumbering in the “in-itself ” stage of being, patiently waiting to be enlightened by an outside source, the proletariat had to endure passivity. It was an object of history. Throughout that period, the intelligentsia served as the Subject of History, jealously guarding the messianic message.⁶⁷ But as soon as the proletariat woke up, this formulation had to be turned around. The intelligentsia became the object of history—now it realized that its consciousness did not emanate from within itself but was a reflection of the proletarian essence. With the apotheosis of history, the intelligentsia was to wither away. “Having completed its task,” wrote Aksel’rod, “the intelligentsia will disappear from the historical scene because its most advanced members realize that, once conscious, the proletariat has to become its own master.” Stating that, “as an organic part of the working class, the intelligentsia is unique only because it is conscious,” Potresov also predicted that a time would come when the intelligentsia “would dissolve into the people’s mass.”⁶⁸ His image of dissolution without residue powerfully conveyed the idea that the intelligentsia and the working class were composed of the same messianic substance. The Marxist intelligentsia, in this analysis, was the only true intelligentsia because it alone was the vehicle of an exclusively proletarian—and, as such, salvationally pure—consciousness. The Russian Marxists invested enormous effort in “unmasking” the Populists, the Anarchists, and the Kadets and in proving that these “pseudo-intelligentsias” (eschatological obstacles) deserved the worst for their erroneous assignment of messianic status to the “toilers” (Populists) and to the “people” (Kadets). The main historical achievement of Marxism, according to Struve (at this stage still more a Social Democrat than a Kadet), was the correct identification of the class-messiah. “Whereas the natural course of things proved that the idealized peasantry did not act as its ideologies hoped it would, the objective tendencies of economic development fully justified our idealization of the proletariat.”⁶⁹ Rival currents in the Russian revolutionary movement reproduced the messianic form of the Marxist myth even as they inverted the myth’s content. Identifying themselves as the true intelligentsia, the Populists and the Kadets criticized the Marxists for failing to recognize that the “toilers,” the “people,” or the “citizens of the Russian empire” were messianic social forces. 

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The “Social Democratic Prayer”—a poem by Mikhail Osorgin (Il’in), a Socialist Revolutionary, composed around —derided Marxist messianic exclusivism:⁷⁰ Rannim utrom vstaet sotsial-demokrat, / Chlen velikoi, rossiiskoi, edinoi, — Proletarskuiu plot’ v burzhuaznyi khalat, / Oblekaet s surovoiu minoi. Popleskavshi nebrezhno na lichnost’ vodoi, / I ob masse podumav pri etom, Na koleni on pal pred ikonoi sviatoi,— / Pred velikogo Marksa portretom. “O velikii uchitel’,”—voskliknul S.D., / “Ty, ch’ia dogma vsegda neprelozhna, Ty, ch’ia skhema navek prilozhima vezde, / Ch’i slova izmenit’ nevozmozhno,— Poveli, chtob S-ry ne znali pobed, / Chtob S-rov razrushilis’ kozni, Choby dazhe mladentsy smotreli na svet, / S tochki zreniia klassovoi rozni. Poveli, chtoby shli my vsegda vperedi, / Chtoby pala obshchinnaia Troiia, I derevni, uchitel’, skorei povedi / Po puti burzhuaznogo stroia, — Chtob skoree sozdal kapital batraka / Choby krupnye vvel proizvodstva, — Chtob skorei, otorvav ot zemli muzhika, / Dal emu s proletariem skhodstvo; Poveli, chtob prokliatyi agrarnyi vopros / Stal skoree agranym otvetom, I ustroi eto tak, chob eshche dlinnyi nos, / Poluchili S-ry pri etom, . . . ” Tak molilsia S.D., vstav so sna, / No v otvet na mol’bu sotsiala, Marks izrek: “Otoidi ot menia satana, / I prochti tretii tom Kapitala.” The Social Democrat rises early / A member of the Great One, the All-Russian, the Universal [party], / His proletarian flesh in a bourgeois robe / He cloaks with stern mien. / Carelessly splashing himself with water, / All the while, with the masses in mind, / He falls on his knees before the sacred icon / A portrait of the great Marx. / “Oh great teacher,” exclaims the SD, “You whose dogma is absolute, / You, whose plan is eternally righteous, / Whose word no one can alter / May the SRs never know victory / May their grand scheme be foiled / May even the child view the world / Through the prism of class discord / May the Trojan commune fall, / And as to the villages, my teacher, guide them firmly / On the path to a bourgeois order / Hasten the time when capital gives birth to the agricultural laborer / So that largescale production is introduced / So that the peasant, torn from the land, / Soon comes to resemble the proletarian. / May the cursed agrarian question / Soon become an agrarian answer. / And see to it that the SR’s nose gets longer and longer.” / Thus prayed the awakening SD / But in response to his supplication / Marx uttered: “Get out of my way, Satan, / And read the third volume of Capital.” 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

According to the poem, what was at stake between the Social Democrats (SDs) and the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) was, Who interprets the situation in Russia most “scientifically”? and Who, consequently, has the right for political leadership? Complaining that his party was unjustly and viciously libeled, Osorgin ended up, however, demonizing the rival party. If taken literally, his claim was that the SRs, and the SRs alone, interpreted Capital correctly, which justified his belief that Marx himself would doubtlessly have sided with the Russian SRs and described SDs as “Satanic.” Clearly, what was peculiar to Marxism was not its messianism as such but the idea that the proletariat, alone, must be cast as the world redeemer. Applied not only to the ideologists of other parties but to intraparty rivals as well, the rhetorical violence typical of the Russian Marxists was directed not only outward but also inward. Accusing each other of identifying the wrong group as the protoproletariat, SD factions often denounced each other as messianic impostors. Thus during the revolutionary year Kleinbort, for example, distinguished between the “demagogues who hide behind the socialist flag,” unfortunately supported by the immature workers’ masses, and “those socialists who are truly loyal to the teaching of Karl Marx” who were supposedly favored by the “advanced workers.”⁷¹ The Working-Thinking New Man

While the message brought by the intelligentsia to the proletariat was about this world, the message was spoken from the beyond. Prophetically aware of the Communism that lay at the End of History, the intelligentsia had to inject freedom into an immanent historical agency if historical transcendence was to be possible. Here we revisit the determinist-voluntarist knot at the heart of Marxism: the unfolding of capitalism (a deterministic process through and through) created the conditions for emancipation, but capitalism was helpless to push the proletariat into the kingdom of freedom. To liberate itself, the proletariat had to find an external anchorage. If the working class embodied the determinist dimension in Marxism, the intelligentsia embodied the voluntarist one. It is in this light that I suggest we interpret the words of a leading Bolshevik, Georgii Piatakov: “The limitless extension of the possible is the feature which . . . makes us men of miracles. . . . Our idea is to bring into life that which is considered impossible, not realizable and inadmissible. . . . We are people of special temper, without any equivalents in history precisely 

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because we make the impossible possible.”⁷² The voluntarist intelligentsia and the determinist working class combined only in the posthistorical creature. Lunacharskii and Bogdanov made similar promises that a day would come when the New Man “would be able to alternate between manual and mental labor. Every thinker will work and every worker will think!”⁷³ In articulating the proletariat-intelligentsia nexus, Marxist eschatology attempted a difficult task—to reconcile the “illumination” of Gnosticism with the Platonic “enlightenment.” The difference here was subtle, but ultimately important. Both spiritual traditions venerated the light of knowledge. In Platonic thought, enlightenment was a long and continual process that took generations to complete, whereas the transition to the divine world was conceived by the Gnostics as an unexpected, instantaneous flash of lightning, breaking the monotonous sequence of mundane moments to propel the elect into timeless existence. As in Platonism, the preconditions for the illumination of humanity evolved, according to Marx, through the process of history. It was only with capitalism that the donors of and the recipient of consciousness were called into existence: only gradually was the human producer stripped of ownership and prepared to embrace universalism; and only slowly was the intelligentsia message refined out of a variety of utopian theories. At the same time, however, the Marxists insisted that emancipation was irreducible to the end result of the gradually unfolding of history (see the discussion in chapter  of the Revolution as both an event within and an event beyond history). The final illumination, the awakening of free consciousness, was qualitatively different from the preceding, tedious, and incremental growth of human knowledge bearing obvious resemblance to the Gnostic outlook. The simultaneous recognition by the proletariat and by the intelligentsia that they were the two primordial halves of the messiah was the “dialectical transformation of quantity into new quality” that supposedly produced a sharp break in history and its sensational consummation. When depicting the workers’ encounter with the intelligentsia, the Russian Marxists invoked the sort of luminary metaphors employed in Gnosticism to symbolize the human discovery of the spirit and emancipation from the grip of the corrupt world.⁷⁴ Light and darkness, Blumenberg maintains, can represent the opposite extremes of metaphysical forces: “The drama of the diaspora and reunification of absolute light is the fundamental conception of Gnosis.” Lost in an alien and enemy sphere, light must be “liberated and led back to its origin.”⁷⁵ But illumination was also prominent in Platonism, 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

in which the crucial drama was displaced from the cosmic history of light to, in the language of Plato’s cave allegory, “the drama of humans turning away from the shadows, or more narrowly and precisely, of breaking the chains that forced their gaze toward the shadows.”⁷⁶ In the Marxist vocabulary, “darkness” indicated the initial, unreflected state of the worker’s mind, which was to be enlightened through education and the accretion of knowledge. An anonymous article in a Social Democratic organ characterized intelligentsia teaching as the light that could save the souls of the oppressed: “A pitch dark night reigns in the soul of the mass of the workers. Suddenly a beam of light streams in causing the blind to see, the desperate to regain hope, and those led astray to find their way. We, the workers who catch eagerly the words of Marx, regain the soul we have lost.” In the same vein the Proletcult publicist Kudeli claimed that emancipation occurred when the intelligentsia exposed the evil nature of class society before the worker: “When I am ignorant, call me an insect,” the latter exclaimed. “When I have knowledge, call me God.”⁷⁷ These luminary images betray the roots of Marxism in salvational spirituality. Universalist consciousness was frequently represented as the sun, which shone from the horizon—the end of the path of history. When attained, consciousness would provide a view through a suddenly transparent structure of social exploitation to a transcendent truth. Revolutionary songs compared the old world with the “bleak, dark night” full of “terrible dreams.” The “better world of tomorrow,” conversely, was compared with the “glimmering dawn.” The Proletcult writers referred to consciousness as “that part of the proletarian psyche which is illuminated.” Discussing the role Marxism could play in “intellectual development,” Dan described “a sunlit height, beckoning to a man . . . who would slowly ascend, emerging from out of the gloomy depths of the ignorance in which his native milieu was stagnating.” Steeped in similar language, Lunacharskii showed to the workers “tender rays of the sun which rose over the horizon slowly, but inexorably”—like Communism. Gorky addressed proletarians like himself as “children of sun, the shining source of life” destined to prevail over the “dark death.”⁷⁸ The New Man could not be considered simply a worker. Had that been the case, the New Man would have been an automaton, an embodiment of determinism bereft of any spark of freedom, a Galatea without Pygmalion to breathe a soul into her. Rather, the paragon of Communism was a proletarian-intelligent. Absorbing the intelligentsia’s messianic message, and acquir

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ing the latter’s personality, the working class was polluted. Ceasing to be its pure self, it turned into the intelligentsia. Sensitive to the possible demise of proletarian autonomy, Kudeli insisted that recourse to an external agent was heretical: “The famous Marxist dictum that `being determines consciousness’ does not mean we believe that spontaneous development can lead to socialism. Far from it, only once an agent intervenes and lights the torch of proletarian consciousness . . . can reason be triumphant.”⁷⁹ The Russian Marxist tradition portrayed ideal workers as individuals who carefully investigated the meaning of their lives. This tradition prided itself on workers who were, in essence, indistinguishable from the intelligentsia. The myth of the worker who embraced intelligentsia consciousness was set up as a model for the entire working class to emulate. Having been accused in the Trial of Fifty () of distributing revolutionary propaganda, the weaver Petr Alekseev became a classic example of a mythical worker. His main merit was his ability to get at the bottom of the messianic relation between the proletariat and the intelligentsia: “the Russian workman can have hope only in himself and can expect help only from our young intelligentsia which has stretched out a brotherly hand to us. . . . It alone, like a good friend and in all sincerity, wants to put us workers on the right road. It alone leads us on, and it alone, united with us, will accompany us until the time when the muscular arms of millions of workers will be raised.” The leading theorist of Marxism, Dan held that “Alekseev had realized that the intelligentsia and proletariat have to march together.” Paradoxically, the “authenticity” of the voice of the proletariat depended, in this analysis, on the proletariat’s ability to speak with the voice of the intelligentsia.⁸⁰ The life story of Viktor Obnorskii, as told by Dan, was a hagiographic narrative structured around the workers’ attainment of consciousness. Dan began the tale noting that, just like Alekseev, Obnorskii passed through Chaikovskyite Populist worker circles. Dan implied that, initially, workers could profit from what the Populist intelligentsia was teaching them. But since the “Populist conception did not ascribe to the workers an independent role in the Revolution,” this stage in workers’ development had to be transcended. Dan explained that their primitivism blinded the Populists to the fact that industrial workers alone were in a position to attain messianic consciousness.⁸¹ According to Dan’s narrative, the consciousness of Obnorskii and his working-class peers gradually outgrew the ideas of their Populist tutors. 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

“Among a small but politically highly trained stratum of the advanced workers . . . a collective struggle for specific workers’ interests very soon began to nurture a feeling of a certain social separateness.” Ideas and tendencies began to spring up among Obnorskii and his fellow workers “that could not be harmonized with the Populism of the intelligentsia even while they themselves, in their own minds, still thought of themselves as ‘Populists.’ ” Still unaware of the Marxist message, Obnorskii was not yet in a position to see what Dan saw thanks to his Marxist acumen. But the “cunning reason” operated in Obnorskii even when he still considered himself a Populist. Proletarian identity, Dan was at pains to stress, might have been only something Obnorskii “felt.” But if fertilized by an appropriate education, the planted seed of genuine proletarian identity would blossom, raising the hero of this Marxist vita to full consciousness. Obnorskii spent the next part of his spiritual odyssey living abroad. There he became familiar with the Western European working-class movement and came to recognize the narrow-mindedness of the nativist Populist teaching. At last, Obnorskii became a Marxist. Obnorskii’s descriptions of the workers and the “moral strength” they need, their status as the “flesh and blood of the state,” and the dependence of “all other classes” on them for existence, echoed, in Dan’s mind, Lasalle’s vision of the proletariat as the “foundation of the ‘church of the future.’ ” The political program Obnorskii eventually wrote for the proletariat was an “out-and-out paraphrase of the Communist Manifesto,” Dan noted in jubilation. Through the mouth of Obnorskii, claimed the narrator, the proletariat started “speaking for itself.” Had all workers completed the spiritual transformation undergone by Obnorskii, the historical mission of Dan and the intelligentsia would have been complete. What is fascinating in Dan’s narrative is that the “intelligentsia,” even as it set about the task of constituting the proletariat, was undergoing deconstruction. By instilling a universalist identity in Obnorskii, Dan, unequivocally a member of the intelligentsia, came to identify with his protégé, becoming, in this sense, a worker. To the extent that universalism was an intrinsically proletarian quality, a broad-minded intelligentsia metamorphosed into a proletariat. The “proletariat” was likewise deconstructed. Aware of his identity as worker, Obnorskii was also a thinker. He thought out the historical task of the proletariat and embraced messianic consciousness. The proletarian’s exclusive identification with the manual laborer was thus obliterated. 

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As they took on the responsibilities of mental labor, conscious workers such as Obnorskii became the intelligentsia.⁸² The memoir of the worker Fedor Samoilov, who was later to become a Bolshevik Duma member, demonstrated how, by assuming intelligentsia habits, a worker estranged himself from his class. Samoilov recalled how, reading profusely after work, he aroused the anger of his comrades who were disturbed by his constantly burning lamp. “Sharing with me the same living space, my fellow workers lived the life of beasts of burden: all they cared about was working, sleeping and eating, without ever having any intelligent diversions except bad jokes, fooling around and intoxication.” Clearly, his theoretical interests turned Samoilov into a member of the intelligentsia.⁸³ Universalist consciousness, not social origins or position in production, was the ultimate measure for proletarian identity. Marxists placed no genetic limitations on the title: those who came to think universalistically became “proletarians in spirit” (proletarii dukhom). Lenin pointed out that the intelligentsia could not be delegitimated on the grounds that it was petit bourgeois: “if social origins will be made into a fetish, workers, having been small landowners in the past, would have to be relegated to the petite bourgeoisie as well!” Although the Russian Social Democracy identified itself as “the party of the proletariat,” its first program stipulated that “non-proletarians will be accepted . . . if they assume the proletarian point of view.” In the words of an anonymous Marxist pamphleteer Marx, Engels, and Lenin, unhampered by their nonproletarian origins, “were the best among the intelligentsia, capable of renouncing individualism, plumbing the depth of human suffering and sacrificing themselves for the proletariat.”⁸⁴ To be sure, because the capitalist worldview was circumscribed by economic interest, bourgeois mass conversion to universalism was unlikely. But altruistic men of knowledge were perfectly capable of realizing that the present economic order was dehumanizing. Conversely, workers by birth did not automatically qualify to become messianic agents. Nadezhda Krupskaia explained that workers, although instinctively inclined toward universalism, still needed to elevate themselves to the level of consciousness characteristic of the Marxist intelligentsia: “First, the worker has to comprehend . . . the mechanism of the social order around him. Only then can he call himself a Communist.” Elsewhere Krupskaia added: “It is absolutely necessary that proletarian origins would be supplemented by the absorption of proletarian consciousness. Consciousness does not come with birth. It has to be ac

The Janus-Faced Messiah

quired.” Workers could not reach consciousness if they bypassed the intellectual achievements of capitalism: “Proletarian culture must link with the intelligentsia. In order to stand at the head of its class, the new workers’ intelligentsia has to arm itself with a thorough . . . understanding of bourgeois society.”⁸⁵ As long as the proletariat did not answer to its calling, it was regarded as a particularist class, one social entity among many. The same was true for the intelligentsia, doomed to wallow in its particularist predicament unless it realized that its mission was to seek union with the proletariat. To treat the proletariat and the intelligentsia merely as empirical entities is to impoverish the Marxist notion of class. The Marxists agreed that these groups could remain interest-driven material forces for the longest time. When salvational self-awareness was stunted, messianic agency languished. But to express themselves, to live up to their true potential, to reveal their full eschatological splendor, the proletariat and the intelligentsia had to overcome their particularity, to transcend all narrow interests, and to start performing as world redeemers. The Class-Gender Nexus in the Marxist Foundational Myth

The mythical encounter between the proletariat and the intelligentsia received an interesting twist in Nietzschean Marxism. Nietzsche was banned from the Social Democratic philosophical pantheon and could hardly have exerted a direct influence on the Marxist intellectual scene in Russia, but a number of his notions were embedded in the revolutionary discourse before  and even survived in transmuted form, exerting their influence in Soviet Russia. To a large extent, the Bolshevik view of the Revolution as an iconoclastic action attaining freedom by a violent liberation of human feeling was deeply implicated in Silver Age Nietzschean radicalism.⁸⁶ Nietzschean Marxists revealed with particular clarity how the proletariat and the intelligentsia were two inseparable concepts fused into a messianic dyad. In this tradition, which represents a certain displacement but not a break with Marxist discursive solidarity, the meaning of the proletariat and the intelligentsia was constructed through gender categories. Implicitly assuming “thinking” to be a feminine faculty, Nietzschean Marxism cast the intelligentsia in the symbolic role of the “female.” The proletariat, meanwhile, was assigned the purportedly “masculine” faculty of “acting.” The 

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unification of the two messianic elements was articulated in Nietzschean Marxism through the motif of the Revolution as rape. The proletariat had to appropriate the intelligentsia because “he” needed “her” mind to become conscious. The intelligentsia, conversely, entertained something like a rape fantasy because “she” needed a proletarian body to become real. An investigation of this gender-class nexus helps to explain why the classic Marxist myth of proletarian autonomy was bound to unravel: the proletariat was incomplete without the affirmation of the intelligentsia as to its consciousness, just as the male was incomplete without the female’s affirmation of his masculinity.⁸⁷ Exploration of the Nietzschean themes within Russian Marxism alerts us to the violent aspects of the relationship between the intelligentsia and the proletariat. In the Marxist analysis, the intelligentsia had to be obliterated as an independent entity. First, the majority of the intelligentsia remained a bourgeois accomplice and a sworn enemy of the proletariat. Classless society could not be ushered in unless the social layer responsible for indoctrinating the proletariat with alien ideas was annihilated. Second, the progress of history was constantly increasing the polarization between the ever purer but naturally ever more select group of the good intelligentsia, and the considerable eschatological waste—that part of the intelligentsia that refused to bond with the class-messiah. Third, the mutual dependence of the proletariat and the Marxist intelligentsia did not mean the two components of the class-messiah always interacted amicably. Quite the contrary, the motif of mutual appropriation invested class rhetoric with elements of compulsion sometimes associated with the troubled relations between the sexes. The Marxist intelligentsia had to shake up the sleeping messiah and, if need be, force the proletariat to heed its proselytizing. The proletariat, in turn, had to coerce the intelligentsia into giving up exclusive claims for eschatological leadership. The rhetorical—and, later, very real—brutality of the Soviet regime toward the intelligentsia is inexplicable without a full appreciation of the motif of ferocious encounter between the split halves of the world redeemer.⁸⁸ The main focus here is on the writings of Nikolai Gredeskul, a professor at the Petrograd Politechnical Institute in the s and perhaps the only Nietzschean Marxist who addressed the question of the intelligentsia directly in a number of texts from the revolutionary period.⁸⁹ Other Marxist texts, however, will also be cited to show how they shared important aspects of Gredeskul’s poetical framework. The notion of class war between the prole

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tariat and the “treacherous intelligentsia” that “betrayed its historic mission” was not unique, of course. What made Gredeskul’s discussion of the subject interesting was his understanding of the intelligentsia and the proletariat not merely through the orthodox prism as social classes but also, in a much more Nietzschean vein, as being character archetypes. In Gredeskul’s articles we have evidence of the Nietzschean Marxist assumption that psychology and not economic power was the main factor separating the proletariat from the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia was “individualistic” and “feminine” and, therefore, “selfish” and “evil.” The proletariat was “collectivist” and “masculine” and, as such, “universalist” and “good.”⁹⁰ Much of the prerevolutionary cultural elite not only did not condemn the revolution in any wholesale manner but saw it as realizing at least some of their own cherished aspirations for unhindered activity and absolute freedom. After October , Gredeskul reached the conclusion that the Bolshevik Revolution was not a break in Russian history but its consummation. A consideration of Gredeskul’s intellectual evolution demonstrates how Nietzsche could be used to refashion Marxist vocabulary, rendering Marxism acceptable to thinkers drawn to voluntarism, and thus to widen the Bolshevik appeal. It is well known that the intellectual formation of Bolshevism coincided with a wave of interest in Nietzschean philosophy. One scholar of the subject claims that “the majority of Bolshevik intellectuals came under the influence of Nietzsche, an influence which varied only in intensity from one individual to another.” To be sure, when the Bolsheviks came to power Nietzsche fell out of favor and was declared a decadent bourgeois philosopher. Lunacharskii, formerly an enthusiast, was compelled to recant and describe Nietzsche’s followers as “sundry intellectual renegades, miscellaneous cultured and hypercultured neurotics.”⁹¹ Gredeskul’s intellectual odyssey, however, evolved in a different direction. This onetime member of the Kadet party found much to admire in Nietzsche and much to despise in a heavily deterministic interpretation of Marxism. He embraced Soviet Power only after , once he found a way to reconcile Marxism to Nietzschean pathos, and economic science to psychologism. Thus, Nietzschean Marxism functioned for Gredeskul as a bridge between liberalism and Bolshevism. In the early s he was a leader of the Petrogradbased Group of Left Professors and preached to them on the importance of accepting the revolution and “not falling behind the working class.” In his 

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 lecture entitled “The Intelligentsia and Soviet Power,” Gredeskul called on students of Leningrad State University “to give everything they could to Soviet power and to join Bolshevik organizations.”⁹² To what extent was Nietzschean Marxism part of Marxist discursive solidarity? Was Nietzschean Marxism not a bizarre hybrid of incompatible political philosophies, more an intellectual oddity than a set of notions worthy of serious attention? Indeed, the Nietzschean emphasis on accidents, discontinuities, and reversals in history stands in stark contrast to the Marxist belief in historical inevitability. Nietzsche’s notorious emphasis on—not to say celebration of—violence appears to contradict the ethical surcharge that was such an important component of Marxism. And yet, as we shall see, these dissimilarities should be construed as differences in emphasis rather than as violations of the Marxist discursive borders. Important features of the Marxist myth and the Nietzschean myth were compatible: the Marxist notion of the Revolution, especially insofar as it harks back to the Christian Apocalypse, entails considerable violence. The Revolution was in itself hardly much more ethical than the rebellion of Nietzsche’s Superman. Merciless in its practice, the Revolution postponed to a future day the establishment of a new moral code. We have seen that additional tenets of Marxism ostensibly at odds with Nietzsche’s thought were actually far more richly textured than sometimes appears: the Marxist cult of determinism (the regularity with which historical events unfold) required its own complete negation in a dramatic revolutionary action; and the much discussed Marxist disregard of personality had its demand for a Promethean hero. Finally, there is the clash between the Marxist cult of consciousness as a tool for overcoming desire and Nietzsche’s celebration of the rebellion of the flesh against the spirit. Here again, the tension between the components of Nietzschean Marxism is important but not necessarily insuperable. The thisworldliness of Marxism came to the rescue of its adherents: Russian Marxists never advocated complete asceticism. Their aim, rather, was to release the healthy, vibrant proletarian body from the control of the conservative bourgeois ideology. Brought under the control of the workers’ own minds, the body was supposed to express itself freely, and certainly not to be mortified. In a word, the celebration of ferocious libidinal destructiveness and unbridled, voluntarist action (Gredeskul’s Nietzschean moments, as it were) had important moments to build on in the poetics of the Marxist myth. The poetics of Gredeskul’s writings is worth a close scrutiny because it 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

reveals the verbal clusters and systems of reference that were common in Nietzschean Marxism, and it elucidates the channels by which voluntarist and psychologizing ideas were grafted onto official Marxist concepts. Many of the Marxist terms, slogans, and phrases employed by Gredeskul were linked to Nietzschean vocabulary.⁹³ Marxist notions such as “antiphilistinism,” “revolutionary violence,” “appropriation of the intelligentsia” took on a distinct surcharge. The epitome of any Marxist Revolution, the New Man (a creature who triumphed over bourgeois inhibitions, disingenuous moralizing, sexual subjugation, and the subordination of action to thought), came to resemble Nietzsche’s “hedonistic,” “immoral,” and “willful” Superman. As to the gender aspect of Gredeskul’s notions of the proletariat, the intelligentsia, and the New Man: the intimate interrelation of the masculine and the feminine in Gredeskul’s poetics is an important manifestation of a broader Marxist discourse, in which the intelligentsia and the proletariat were inseparable Siamese twins. The misogynist streak in Gredeskul diverged sharply from a Western tradition that believed men had a body and women were a body. The Gnostic Sophia—the feminine principle whose admiration of her own intellect made her commit the fatal cosmic crime of inventing matter in order to see her beauty reflected in it—was much closer to what Gredeskul had in mind when he spoke of the degenerated intelligentsia. For the followers of Nietzsche, the feminine was spiritual to the point of losing all substance.⁹⁴ Nietzsche’s misogyny was linked to his anti-intellectualism. The call “Beware of the scholars! They hate you, for they are sterile,”⁹⁵ reflected Nietzsche’s view of the intelligentsia as “an ally of the barbarism of taste,” “essentially infertile,” a “herd animal”—all stereotypical attributes consonant with the image of the female who plays at dissimulation, ornamentation, deceit, and artifice. “From the beginning nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance.”⁹⁶ In articulating the interaction between the proletariat and the intelligentsia around the male/female opposition (and its derivative, body/mind), Gredeskul’s narrative followed Nietzsche’s example. Gredeskul associated the intelligentsia with the deprecated role of the female, while assigning the masculine role to the proletariat. His heavily gendered language underscored the linkage between masculine/feminine and action/thought oppositions, suggesting that the “intellectual caste” was “weak” but “effective” because of its “deceitfulness” and “masking of reality.” By using “her” control over knowl

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edge, so the argument went, the (female) intelligentsia hoped to prevent the (male) working class from realizing the truth of “his” exploitation. That for Gredeskul the intelligentsia was the female and proletariat was the male was suggested by the gender specificity of a variety of metaphors invoked by the text to describe the opposing classes: intellectual prostitute (intellektual’nye prostitutki) versus strong man (sil’nyi chelovek); sponge (mochalka) versus stone (kamen’); cunning illusion (khitraia iliuziia) versus rapist (nasil’nk) or barbarian (varvar). What was crucial here was that the two axes—class and gender—relied on complementary contraries in constructing the meaning of their categories. The mind of the female intelligentsia and the body of the male proletariat had to find a way to unite if they were to put an end to the sterility of the capitalist civilization. “Re-creating Russia and finding in the new society the recognition of his human worth our worker is both thinking and acting.” After the proletarian victory in the Revolution, the tension between the conflicting attributes of class and gender was to be mediated in the face of the New Men. When passing to the description of the “new proletarian intelligentsia,” the child of the Revolution, Gredeskul gradually shifted gender: from “intelligentsia” (feminine singular) to “intelligent forces” (intelligentskie sily, feminine plural) and finally to “new member of the intelligentsia” (novyi intelligent, masculine singular) and “agitation personnel” (personal, masculine plural).⁹⁷ The association of intellectualism with feminism and decadence formed the backdrop to Gredeskul’s discussion. “Nietzsche,” he wrote, “can hardly find words strong enough to express his contempt for the pitiful, worthless creature called contemporary man. If he is a slave, he deserves his fate, since he is incapable of overcoming his slavery.” But in bringing class analysis back in, Gredeskul fused Nietzsche with Marx. The intelligentsia was described as the agent of capital: “The intelligentsia joined forces with reaction [reaktsiia, feminine] and counterrevolution [kontr-revoliutsiia, feminine].” Capitalism, it was here suggested, induced specifically feminine psychological traits into the intelligentsia. The long array of pejorative terms with which Gredeskul attacked the intelligentsia were associated with the feminine. “The intelligentsia falsifiers create a counterfeit, distorted, unnatural state of affairs. Instead of externalizing energy by spending it on action,” the intelligentsia inverted the course of the energy’s normal outflow. “Due to such constant inhibition of action the intelligentsia forfeited both her will and her feeling; she is powerless, will-less, internally rotten.”⁹⁸ 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

Inverting the forces of the human organism against itself, the intelligentsia tricked the proletariat into emulating her own weakness. One Marxist wrote that “the intelligentsia paralyzed the will and the mind of the worker [and] turned him into a machine that satisfies her lustful appetites [vozhdeleniia].” Paradoxically, it was precisely because the proletarian became a mindless creature, nothing but a brute force, that he was emasculated. The Russian intelligentsia, Gredeskul told his readers, could emerge and develop only because the broad masses performed the menial physical work, whereas the intelligentsia was entrusted with managerial and organizational functions. The capitalist division of labor endowed the intelligentsia with nothing but “brains,” while the proletariat was a thing of “muscles” only: “The workers overstrain their powers and waste their health. They have no chance to think of their human dignity. The light of culture is blocked from their sight.” Furthermore, Gredeskul argued, “the worker, the foundation of humanity, is reduced to a beast of burden. . . . His human face is distorted by the convulsions of inhuman labor, by his emasculated anger.”⁹⁹ The gruff worker could not match the intelligentsia’s sophistication. Gredeskul related an argument he had overheard between workers and intelligentsia. Although in the wrong, the intelligentsia prevailed in this argument because “she was the master of the word,” taking full advantage of the “delicacy of her subtle comments.” Gredeskul was annoyed by the intelligentsia’s cerebral vanity: “They think they ‘know’ everything and ‘understand’ everything.” When workers did strive for the light of knowledge, the intelligentsia considered them to be “trespassing.” Like the “noble savage,” the worker was ethically pure, but in his innocence he came close to being an emasculated idiot. The male, in his credulousness and naïveté, castrates himself. Capitalism made use of “the intelligentsia’s muscles” (that is, her brains) and she, in abetting the dehumanization of the proletariat, lost all touch with reality. The Proletcult pundit Fedor Kalinin set the intellect of the intelligentsia against the sensibility of the proletarian body: “The intelligentsia is unable to feel the way workers do. Maybe she can attain proletarian consciousness but certainly not the proletarian way of feeling. . . . The latter is inaccessible to her.” On the other hand the worker, according to Kalinin, “could only dimly sense the motions of his soul.” The best formulation of the muscles/brains opposition as the key to the class struggle was provided by Jan Makhaev: “There are only two classes of people, slaves and masters, physical and mental laborers locked in a war for life and death. The master 

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class alone utilizes its brains. . . . The class of slaves is condemned to serve human society only through the movement of the animalistic organs.”¹⁰⁰ Despite appearances, the intelligentsia were the ones that fared the worst. Under capitalism, the body of the proletarian and the soul of the intelligentsia (their respective means of production) were both utterly corrupted. “But what was specific to mental labor,” explained Polonskii, “was this strange element called ‘the soul.’ The workers sold the owner only their hands, while their thoughts and feelings remained free at the end of the workday. Not so the intelligentsia which, by selling her mental faculties, gave up a parcel of her most inner self.” This unique enslavement stamped the intelligentsia with a mark of obsequiousness and mental, not only physical, pliancy to the demands of the master. The outlook of the intelligentsia came to resemble the notoriously subservient psychology of female domestics. Maksim Gorky went to Nietzsche when he needed to borrow “specific reasons for condemning the weakness, flabbiness and effeminacy of male intellectuals.” Like Gredeskul, Gorky associated passivity and weakness with effeminacy and condemned intellectuals for not demonstrating the masculine traits of aggressiveness and strength.¹⁰¹ Innocence was not something the caste of mental laborers could boast of. Though weak, the intelligentsia was cunning and resourceful. In stereotypical feminine fashion, “she was constantly promising,” perfectly aware that a consummation of her betrothal would have led her to lose her power over the masculine proletariat (who depended on her to show him the way to salvation or sexual gratification). The intelligentsia lured the worker through surface impressions. The opposition of outside (appearance, female) to inside (essence, male) recurred throughout Gredeskul’s texts. The intelligentsia was the fetish, the appearance of truth; the proletariat was the essence, the truth itself. The values disseminated by the intelligentsia “mask the absence of real content behind her.” For Nietzsche, woman was a nonfigure, a simulacrum that “engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality.”¹⁰² This talk of insubstantial simulacra resonated with the Marxist notion of fetishism, in which the intelligentsia produced an “alienated rationality,” an array of fetishes fashioned to give the appearance of freedom and equality while veiling the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat. According to Gredeskul the intelligentsia, “the carrier of knowledge [nositel’nitsa znanii, feminine] and scholarship [nauka, feminine],” was brainwashing the working class. In the words of the Bolshevik theorist Vol’fson, “As the puppet of 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

the bourgeoisie . . . she disseminates social deceptions by preaching moral and cultural values.”¹⁰³ Nietzsche claimed that “woman is indescribably more evil than man; and cleverer,” and Gredeskul took this to mean that the intelligentsia engaged in a form of sabotage, functioning as “a social brake, an inhibiting apparatus” that blocks working-class rebellion. No matter how strong he was, the proletariat could not crush her any more than he could “slice up air.” When attacked, the substanceless intelligentsia “evaporates into thin air.” The intelligentsia, Reisner reasoned, believed in bourgeois slogans, since, “having no substance, she has nothing but the ideas she fabricates herself. Whatever strength she had” was purely negative, amounting only to the ability to dupe the proletariat. When faced with the demystifying Revolution, “the intelligentsia only wails.”¹⁰⁴ As long as the bourgeois society lasted, however, “and the working class kept mistaking screens for reality,” the intelligentsia’s deceit remained effective. This was why “the deceptive intelligentsia slogans, ‘freedom,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘fraternity,’ have to be annihilated!” Duped by the intelligentsia, the proletarian failed to realize that bourgeois ethics were designed specifically to paralyze his masculine prowess and to sustain inequality. In this context, Rousseau’s aphorism was pertinent: “Unable to make themselves into men, the women make us into women.” The proletarian was coaxed into believing that “acts of violence” on his part were immoral, that “it was better to be a victim than to threaten the life of someone else.” Resistance was declared premature and indefinitely deferred and the “simple, human feelings” of the proletarian were muffled.¹⁰⁵ To highlight the link between the intelligentsia’s power and her feminine weakness, Gredeskul employed the metaphor of a web (pautina, feminine) woven by the intelligentsia so that “those suffering from exploitation” would not be able to take “direct action against it.” Fairly small and weak, the female intelligentsia spider spun a delicate, barely visible net, into which then tumbled a larger and stronger, albeit ignorant, creature —a metaphor for a paralyzed proletariat, engrossed in the ideological constructs produced by the “smart-alecks weaving moral and social webs.” Here Gredeskul had a long tradition to fall back on. Marie Antoinette—much like the intelligentsia, the embodiment of the feminine—was described by the French Revolutionaries as “the cunning spider, the virtual vampire who sucks the blood of the French.” And, much closer to home, the syndicalist-Marxist Lozinskii described the intelligentsia as a “spider’s spawn, spreading its web.” 

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Lunacharskii added that “her moral theory was mere fetters on the proletariat’s creativity.”¹⁰⁶ Nietzschean misogynism was spread across the Marxist camp. Thus it is possible to cull from Lenin’s references to the intelligentsia a list of pejoratives that brought Gredeskul’s rhetoric to mind. The feminizing and debasing nouns Lenin heaped on the intelligentsia are many: “whiners” (nytiki), “snifflers” (khliupiki), “tearful fools,” (slezotochivye durachki), “riffraff” (drebeden’), “sellouts,” “valets,” “phrasiologists,” “little people who walk on stilts” (khodul’nye liudishki), “keeners,” “droolers” (sliuntiai), and “self-satisfied slaves.” Similarly inspired, Lenin’s adjectives described the intelligentsia as “capricious,” “indecisive,” “impotent,” “amoral,” “pitiful,” “faint-hearted” (malodushnaia), “hysterical,” “infected with poison,” “self-interested” (korystnaia), “self-enclosed,” “hypocritical,” “begging” (klianchlivaia), and “blind.” Lenin attributed to the intelligentsia what Nietzsche characterized as typically feminine mendacity, disguised as frailty: peevish (nervoznaia) and grumbling (brizzhashchaia), “the intelligentsia pours forth innumerable phrases,” “loves to weep” and “to make faces” (krivliaetsia). Feigning she was a “holy fool” (iurodivaia), the intelligentsia was “twisting words without content,” flirting (zaigryvaet) with workers with the hope of using them as “her cannon fodder.” The power of the intelligentsia, Lenin apparently agreed with Gredeskul, was cerebral, residing in her ability “to fool the people as well as herself.” When unmasked, the intelligentsia proved to be “false,” “powerless,” “pitiful,” “disoriented,” and “cowardly.” The workers, on the other hand, were described by Lenin in unmistakenly masculine terms: “raging” (bushuiushie) and “indomitable” (neukrotimye). Usually only implied by such terms as “vacillating,” “unscrewed,” and “wobbly” (to cite another Bolshevik, Meshcheriakov), the femininity of the intelligentsia was rendered absolutely explicit by Trotsky: “Her social function enhances the intelligentsia’s feminine features. Undercutting her power, refined intuition trained the intelligentsia to be contemplative, flexible and impressionable.”¹⁰⁷ The Rape of the Intelligentsia

In Gredeskul’s calls on the proletariat to cast off the shackles forged by the intelligentsia, the rebellion of a Marxist Prometheus combined with the protest of a Nietzschean Superman. Gredeskul hinted at the proletarian need for the intelligentsia’s brains: “Workers have to transcend their unique 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

psychological traits, . . . that obsession with the concrete . . . inculcated into them by the atmosphere of physical labor.” From the point of view of the intelligentsia, the same event could be understood as an attachment to her of the body of the proletariat. To be truly alive, the intelligentsia had to borrow from the proletariat, the only class that was linked to production and in that sense “real.” In Vol’skii’s formulation: “Giving thought his muscles . . . the worker redeems thought from her solitude and transforms thought into something palpable.” The intelligentsia envied (in the words of the Bolshevik literary critic Sakulin) the proletariat’s “elemental” confidence in his historical rightness, “his youth,” “energy,” and “gay, combatant, and creative bravery.” Lunacharskii advised the intelligentsia: “Separated from labor, . . . bereft of a social instinct and lacking the revolutionary swing of the creative soul, you have to borrow from the workers.”¹⁰⁸ The intelligentsia could not dupe the proletariat for ever. The class-messiah was destined to rebel and assume his position as the ruler of the universe. The transformation of the proletariat into an active agent can be traced to the break of the young Marx with the late Romantic submission to nature. In Romantic thought, there could be no resolution to the longing for expression as long as the proletariat remained passive. Wessell identifies such Romantic strains in Marx’s early poetry where “music, femininity, divinity and water intermingled to produce a tempting allure.” These elements amount to an external representation of the inner power of the Sirens (femininity) to seduce the proletarian mind and render it passive. The Sirens enraptured the listener “until the flood submerged him.” The effect the feminine had on the masculine in Romanticism paralleled the effect the intelligentsia had on the proletariat. To save himself, the proletariat had to assume a new, active disposition. Gredeskul had in mind this transformation when he urged workers to disregard the intelligentsia’s calls for passive conformism and to attack the moral principles presented by the intelligentsia as immutable. The proletarian desire to merge with nature had to change into a desire to subdue it. And this meant that the intelligentsia had to be destroyed so the proletariat could become “his own creator.”¹⁰⁹ Nietzsche came into play at this point, introducing the heroic dimension into Russian Marxism. This powerful Promethean thrust, so dear to Gredeskul, counterbalanced the passivity and emotional flatness of late nineteenth-century Marxist determinism.¹¹⁰ The birth of the new, proletarian order had to be founded on a supremely violent act. The very notion of the Revolution was inseparable from such an 

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act, for only by brutal means could a new order be founded and a new law be born. The founding of this new order, if it was to be a real novelty in human affairs, had to cast out the traditional principles of legality. The old order would of necessity regard the new order as lawless (that is, violent), for otherwise, the Revolution would have effected no substantive change and the old ways would be allowed to pollute the new regime. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the establishment of order demanded a disorderly act par excellence. The bedrock of the old order, the intelligentsia and its ideas, had to be vanquished. In varying configurations, the theme of purifying violence appears in almost all eschatologies. As Bernice Rosenthal wrote: “the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ were preceded by unheard-of calamities in both the human and the cosmic spheres. The Apocalypse itself, moreover, was a terrifying event with unprecedented suffering accompanying the total destruction of the old order, including destruction by fire, earthquake, and violent cataclysm of the physical universe itself. Thus, from an eschatological perspective, disaster is cause for hope.”¹¹¹ Ricoeur observes that in mythical symbolism, chaos was seen as anterior to order and that the principle of evil was coextensive with the establishment of order. This may explain why the new classless order had to be preceded by an act of violence, perpetrated by the proletariat. In ancient Near Eastern mythology, Ricoeur informs us, evil was identified with chaos: this fluidity antedating all order was embodied by the goddess Tiamat, the ur-female. Tiamat wished to subjugate the inferior gods, much like the intelligentsia that wished to control the workers. In self-defense, the young god Marduk, a Prometheus figure no doubt, severed his dependence on the “Mother of Things,” turning against his primordial parent. Victorious, the ur-male Marduk became the vanquisher of disorder, and the founder of the orderly cosmos we inhabit. Ricoeur points out that “Marduk appears as a brute force [that] personifies the identity of creation and destruction.” The structure of the ancient myth was preserved in the metaphor of the proletariat’s violent subjugation of the intelligentsia. The creative act of bringing about order (for Gredeskul, classless society) was concomitant with the violent annihilation of the primordial chaos (capitalism) and thus was inseparable from the violent act that destroyed the ur-female, building the new world from her remains. The story of Marduk’s violence against Tiamat may be seen as a justification for proletarian (masculine) protest, as a primordial violence that established at the same time as it destroyed, violence that was “inscribed in the origins of things.”¹¹² 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

Transposing mythical themes into Bolshevik language, Trotsky expressed the certainty that “though a new century has opened to salvos of cannons and the rumbling of rifles, hatred and murder, famine and blood, it augurs a radiant future in which Man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy and happiness.” The term “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” described the revolutionary compulsion, which was to continue until the final erection of Communism. Zinoviev posited that the proletarian rule had carried out a “revolutionary surgery upon the intelligentsia whose flesh had to be seared.” Gredeskul considered the myth of violence as the basis for social transformation in terms of both the Russian Revolution and the revolution that had effected the transition from the ancient to the medieval world— ”that initiation of a new era.” The barbarian invasion symbolized not the destruction of civilization but the construction of a new culture. Similarly, Gredeskul justified the destructiveness of the proletarian Revolution by the birth of a new humanity: “Doing away with the division [of humanity] into states, our Revolution creates one humanity.”¹¹³ The context of unbridled revolutionary violence replaced the metaphor of symbiosis between intelligentsia’s head and proletariat’s heart with an image of rape. Although sexual rape rarely rose to the surface of the Marxist discourse in any explicit formulation, the motif of “revolutionary rape” (revoliutsionnoe nasilie) informed the poetics of many Nietzschean Marxist texts.¹¹⁴ In Gredeskul’s case, the forcible appropriation of intelligentsia knowledge by the proletariat imbued the Revolution with meaning. Here it is best to rely on a feminist interpretation of rape as “unreadable,” a “conspicuous absence”, a configuration in which “sexual violence against women is an origin of social relations and narratives from which the violence is subsequently elided.” Some of the most ancient of such narratives “have established precedents and left legacies that continue to animate our cultural self-representations.” Such “prior” erotic violence and rape, as occur in these founding tales, became naturalized as myths that simultaneously articulated and hid the essence of foundational narratives. René Girard elaborates the meaning of the sacrifice of the feminine in the formation of order: “The ritual violence that accompanies the exchange of women”—dubbed by Girard “the mechanism of the surrogate victim”—served a sacrificial purpose that lay at the origin of “symbolic thought and language,” since it symbolized the shift from the interior of the community to the exterior, a shift that was the crux of revolutionary change.¹¹⁵ 

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Foundational myths of violence have been a subject of fruitful investigation by anthropologists. Mary Douglas has conceptualized the link between the physical body and the body politic: “The interaction of two bodies, the actual physical body and the socially defined body” is generated by metaphor. “The human body is always treated as an image of society.” The human preoccupation with the body and the taboos associated with virginity, Douglas concludes, are the expression of patterns of hierarchy. To translate this discussion into the terms of Nietzschean Marxism: the imperative to preserve feminine chastity (an obsession of the capitalist order) sustained belief in the chastity of the capitalist order itself and its moral code, sanctified by the intelligentsia. To defeat capitalism, the proletariat had to vanquish its feminine protector. This is why the proletarian violation of the intelligentsia’s chastity took on the meaning of a constitutive moment in the revolutionary subversion of social hierarchy. A reversal of Douglas’s suggestion that “if there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries” informs the link between the Marxist desire to revolutionize the body politic and Gredeskul’s metaphors of the violation of bodily boundaries.¹¹⁶ In the imagination of Nietzschean Marxism, the brainless (but good) working class had to rape the clever (but evil) intelligentsia. The proletariat had to reject the complex rules of behavior dictated by the intelligentsia and “cut the Gordian knot.” The Revolution was to be carried out by the workers and directed against the intelligentsia: “The intelligentsia does not help, she sees the Revolution as a mob rebellion.”¹¹⁷ In Gredeskul’s narrative it was Lenin, Alexander the Great of the Russian Revolution, who “cut through the web of moralistic tangles the intelligentsia spread” and reasserted the basic human truth—that evil is evil and the one who is victimized by evil has the right to resist. It took Bolshevism—“the doctrine of the deed,” according to Gredeskul—“to reestablish human dignity.” Lenin himself annotated a sentence in a pamphlet by a rival Menshevik—who argued that the correct, determinist interpretation of Marxism “cuts off flights of fancy”—with “Oh, you eunuch!” Menshevism was, in Lenin’s eyes, typical of the intelligentsia’s selfemasculating set of positions. Read through the gender lens, Lunacharskii’s formulation that “the intelligentsia attempts to starve the proletariat by embarking on an intellectual strike” could also mean that the intelligentsia deserved what she got because she tried to subdue the proletariat by denying her sexual/intellectual services.¹¹⁸ 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

Proletarian revolutionary violence—“the annihilation of the toilers’ exploitation”—was, in this analysis, a natural self-defense. Defeated “not just verbally but also by brute force,” the intelligentsia, according to Gredeskul, had only herself to blame. Her rape was prompted by her habit of “spiritually coercing the exploited.” The proletariat had no time to plumb the depths of the intelligentsia soul: “A person grasped by his throat and strangled has neither the time nor the inclination to reflect on the psychic processes taking place in the soul of his enemy. . . . He strikes.” Spider webs were not to help the intelligentsia at this decisive hour. Vol’skii predicted that the Revolution was to be filled with healthy ethical iconoclasm: “Everything is now permitted! The fearful, niggardly conscience, this mystical voice of the moral imperative, is shut down, no longer muffling the roar of the passions! . . . The truth of the pleasure-seeking proletarian body is counterposed to traditional authorities. . . . History shows the superiority of power over morals. Hate turns into the supreme emotion. . . . Did Mount Vesuvius asked permission from the Roman intelligentsia before erupting?!”¹¹⁹ Now the proletariat attacked: “hollowing the walls of the old intelligentsia bastions,” wrote Aaron Zalkind, a prominent Bolshevik physiologist; “branding the intelligentsia with contempt and disgrace,” wrote Gredeskul. “All proletarian muscles are strained during the Revolution. His passions seething, it is easy to get carried away . . . and indulge in anti-intelligentsia motions,” wrote Zinoviev, Leningrad Party leader. The proletariat had an urge to see the intelligentsia lying prostrate in front of him. “The intelligentsia has to salute her subjugation by the working class . . . submitting her knowledge to the Revolution. [As in English, in Russian the root-word ‘submit’ (otdat’-otdat’sia) has sexual connotations.] . . . She must recognize the primacy of action over contemplation, the primacy of the Revolution over scholarship. . . . She must wean herself from the habit of behaving like a haughty lord.” Following Gredeskul, the Bolshevik Kerzhentsev suggested that the intelligentsia needed “to learn a lesson” and “be taught to subordinate her egotism to the general tasks of the collective.” Her “pathetic lack of character” and her “inability to work” had to be stamped out.¹²⁰ A  proclamation issued in Tomsk predicted that the proletarian (masculine) drive, associated with the Storm and Stress movement, was bound to force the intelligentsia to “prostrate herself morally and psychologically . . . and embrace proletarian consciousness.” Steeped in the Nietzschean Marxist rhetoric of sexual violence and asserting that the proletarian touch alone could 

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“dispose the intelligentsia of its vulgarity and egotism and open her up to proletarian psychology,” this text conjured up a scene of ideological deflowering. “The Revolution helps the intelligentsia cast off her cowardly individualism and philistine egotism [that is, makes the intelligentsia share her knowledge/essence with the proletariat] and immerse herself in the stream of the mass revolutionary movement.” The Tomsk proclamation warned the intelligentsia that protracted resistance was pointless. “Rather than suffer the undesirable loss of intellectual and psychological power,” the intelligentsia had better surrender. No matter how deeply “infected by capitalism,” the intelligentsia could still be saved for the Revolution provided “she cast her wretched heritage off her back . . . and reattached the ties between work and thought.” If she were to do so, “the mental experiences of the intelligentsia” would intensify a “million-fold,” and would later be replaced by “tranquillity and self-satisfaction.” Surely all this suggests a description of orgasm and postcoital relaxation.¹²¹ Additional erotic metaphors underscored Gredeskul’s identification of revolutionary violence with rape. The proletariat was portrayed as the embodiment of virility and physical prowess. Relying on his “stone-like hardness” (phallic metaphor), “the rising proletariat, active and taut” (metaphors of erection), “pulls the intelligentsia down” (metaphor of rape). “When confronted with blows the proletariat does not fold but holds himself erect” (yet another phallic metaphor). Loaded with inverted symbolic baggage, the intelligentsia was described as receptive and passive, “a sponge” that absorbed proletarian aggression. At the sight of the proletariat, the intelligentsia, like the female genitalia, “expands and contracts,” terrified of the working class, which, in her eyes, “was a dark and ignorant mass.” At first “she formed a wall against the rising Bolsheviks. A unified intelligentsia front established itself.” But the potent working class prevailed. The intelligentsia “was either silenced or else began singing a new tune.” The initial resistance and discontent—“the intelligentsia cries, ‘you are Barbarians, rapists’!”—changed under proletarian coercion into songs of praise: “The mouth of the old intelligentsia was shut. Its resistance and abstinence was rooted out.”¹²² Similar images of rape appeared in Bolshevik civil war posters. A pronounced phallic motif was apparent in Moor’s A Red Present to the White Plan (), which depicted two proletarians bringing an enormous missile into an erect position. Another obvious example was Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with a Red Wedge! (), in which a triangular phallic symbol denoted the active Reds while a concave, penetrated symbol stood for the Whites.¹²³ 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

Proletcult poetry was also filled with rape motifs. Andrei Pomorskii’s “Proletariat” () characterized the class-messiah as an unbridled force of nature: Stikhiia ia; ia moshch’ i uragan, Ia sozidaiu i razrushu, Ia uspokoiu bol’ zhestokikh ran, Vosplameniu robeiushchuiu dushu. I am the elements; a might, a hurricane, / Creation and destruction are within my power, / I assuage the pain of brutal wounds, / And arouse the timid soul.

Although the proletarian spirit lies low, “his” physical prowess is enormous. The opening stanza of Aleksei Gastev’s “Out of Iron We Grow” conjures up the image of a mighty proletarian erection: Gliazhu na nikh i vypriamliaius’ V zhily l’etsia novaia zheleznaia krov’ Ia vyros eshche U menia u samogo vyrastaiut stal’nye plechi i bezmerno sil’nye ruki Ia slilsia s zhelezom . . . I look at them and straighten out / Now iron blood pours into my veins / I have grown bigger yet, / Steely grow my shoulders / and immeasurably / Mighty grow my arms . . .

Vladimir Kirilov’s “The Proletarian Messiah” made clear that the intelligentsia had no choice but to succumb to a vastly superior power: gde prozvenit ego vlastnyi krik, Nedra zemnye vskryvaiutsia Gory pred nim rasstupaiutsia v mig poliusy mira sblizhaiutsiia Where his mighty shout rings out, / The depths of the earth open / The hills part before him in a shot / The earth’s poles grow closer.

A “volcano” in a poem by Verkhoustinskii, the proletariat was now awakened, erect and triumphant: 

        -           Tak probuzhdaetsia vulkan taivshiisia vekami ognesverkaiushchii fontan vstaet, kak groznyi velikan Ia zhiv i ia nad vami! So wakens the volcano, / hidden, for ages / so the fountain, bearing fire, rises / like a stern giant / I live and I stand above you!

Once he conquered, the proletariat expropriated the “thoughts” and “dreams” of the intelligentsia. Pomorskii’s “Proletariat” was even more eloquent on this score: Voidu v zhilishcha ikh, zaimu ikh goroda, Ikh mysliami i snami ovladeiu . . . Voidu v ikh khram, sorvu s bogov pokrovy, Ia budu smel i grozen v etot chas. I v kapishche bogov zazhgu svetil’nik novyi Dlia proletarskikh mass. I will enter their abodes, occupy their cities, / And seize their thoughts and dreams. . . . / I will penetrate their shrine, strip gods of veils, / Bold and fearsome at this hour. / I will light a new lamp / In the temple heated by the gods / For the proletarian masses.

Brutality brought emancipation. For Gastev, the proletarian orgasm was tantamount to the ability to articulate: Nogi moi eshche na zemle, no golova vyshe zdaniia Ia eshche zadykhaius’ ot nechelovecheskikh usilii, a uzhe krichu “slova proshu tovarishchi slova!” My feet are still on the ground, / but my head is higher than a building. / I am still gasping / from inhuman effort, / but already cry / “A word, comrades, a word!”¹²⁴

Every mythical rape gave birth to a future hero. A study of the treatment of rape in Greek mythology tells us that the rape motif, “the single violent en

The Janus-Faced Messiah

counter, bears political fruit when it produces offspring with impeccable pedigrees who found cities.”¹²⁵ Proletarian brutality was no less productive. Akin to Theseus, the founder of Athens, and Romulus, the founder of Rome (both conceived through rape), the child of the violent union of proletariat with intelligentsia was to found the new society. The New Man of Bolshevik dreams was conceived as a futuristic creature, which combined the merits of the proletarian father with those of the intelligentsia mother. Lunacharskii observed that, “impressed by the brute force of the proletariat and attracted to its potency,” the intelligentsia looked “fondly” on the child born out of her own rape, “the beautiful Man of the Future” who was to be the “continuator of the life of the intelligentsia.” Sooner or later, the intelligentsia was bound to realize that her rape was a glorious insemination by the proletariat. “The tomorrow of the Revolution is with her children,” Gredeskul asserted, children who could be trusted with the future, innocent of their parents’ sins.¹²⁶ The apocalyptic overtones of the Bolshevik poetics of childbirth, in Rosenthal’s analysis, bear an uncanny similarity not only to “the Jewish image of the ‘birth-pangs of the Messiah’ and the Christian image of ‘Woman Clothed in the Sun’ who was in labor and ‘pains to be delivered’ ” but also to the “secular Marxist image of the ‘birth pangs of the new order’ and the ‘emergence of the new world from the womb of the old’ complete with the blood and gore of real birth.” Nietzsche wrote: “we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have in us of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe.” It is significant that in order to produce the New Man the proletariat had to rape the intelligentsia—but not kill her or have her otherwise destroyed. The workers were urged to “cannibalize the intelligentsia [intelligenstvoedstvo],” devouring being a widespread euphemism for sexual possession.¹²⁷ The worker needed the mind of his victim if he was to harness his own drives and recognize himself as the vehicle of salvation. As the hyphenated term “worker-intelligent” suggests, the worker had to transform the intelligentsia into a part of himself. The resulting creature was to be neither man nor woman, neither worker nor member of the intelligentsia. The New Man would be an androgyne, a hybrid. Lunacharskii predicted that revolutionary posterity would enjoy “a harmonizing of the body with the soul. Available in ancient Greece but lost by the contemporary bourgeois West, such a harmony will reappear once the Revolution is complete.” El Lissitsky’s “USSR Russische Ausstellung” () and Gustav Klucis’s “Let’s Speed Up 

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Industrialization” () were two posters that depicted oversized faces of a young male and a young female sharing a part of the face or one eye, as if to indicate that the figures were about to merge. The result—neither male nor female—illustrated the idea of androgynous superman. To convey a similar idea, Gredeskul referred to the New Man as “an unordinary creature” (sushchestvo, a neutral gender in Russian), and other Marxists talked about the Revolution’s “monster-child” (detishche, also neutral).¹²⁸ The image of the androgyne and the themes of sexual division, opposition, and recombination have a long tradition in eschatological thought. Abrams’s meticulous research demonstrates the tenacity of the myth of primordial man as a cosmic androgyne, a being with conflicting sexual principles that retains the capacity for recovering his lost identity. The primal Adam was at times seen as an androgyne who embodied the cosmic whole without having a physical body. His fall plunged him “into the gross material world of separated and conflicting physical and sexual elements, in which each individual part tries to be self-sufficient.” The descent into self-division, however, was counteracted by a stronger tendency to return to the source and bring the Fall of Adam to an end with a sexual coupling of the “prototypical male and female opposites.”¹²⁹ Plato’s Symposium also told of a primeval androgyne who was cut asunder, his gendered halves henceforth seeking each other, in order to reestablish a lost unity. According to Abrams, the Neoplatonic Christian philosophers assimilated the concept of sexual division into their biblical narrative of the Fall, symbolizing redemption and the return of humanity from the physical to the spiritual by the unification of the sexes. (The Book of Revelations permitted such an interpretation, stating that “The marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready”; Revelations, :–.) Christ, a synthesis of man and God, was imagined as an androgyne, with feminine and masculine reconciled. The androgyny motifs survived in Romanticism. Schelling drew on the conception of the universe as “a plenum of opposed yet mutually attractive, quasi-sexual forces,” and Novalis talked about the “embrace of male and female, and the child which is conceived in that embrace.”¹³⁰ Finally, the myth of the androgyne reappeared in Nietzsche, the most probable source of Gredeskul’s inspiration. Nietzsche interpreted the Greek myth of Dionysus as a cosmic myth of the Universal Man whose dismemberment constituted primal evil and whose coming resurrection would mark the consummation of History. Dionysus was, according to Nietzsche, “the 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell us that as a boy he was torn to pieces by the Titans. . . . [It] is intimated that this dismemberment . . . [was] the origin and prime cause of all suffering.” When Dionysus was reborn, oneness was restored, an event that “cast a gleam of joy upon the features of a world torn asunder and shattered. . . . breaking down all the barriers erected between man and man.” The Nietzschean conclusion—“now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with his neighbor, but at one with him”—was consonant with the Marxist description of human bliss under Communism. The Nietzschean idea of the death, rebirth, and integration of Dionysus was structurally identical, at least in Gredeskul’s text, to the Marxist pursuit of the abolition of class struggle, birth of the New Man, and reintegration of human society.¹³¹ The Idea of the New Man Unraveled

Uncomfortable with the possibility that his androgynous New Man might be identified with the hyperindividualist superman, Gredeskul impressed upon the reader that what he had in mind was “no selfish nihilist of the sort normally associated with the Nietzschean hero.” He asserted, “Nietzsche lost when he wagered on the exceptional individual,” and went on to embrace instead Marx’s vision of the individualist-collectivist New Man, “who directs his power not only outward, against others, but also inward, somebody fearless not because he is a selfish and uninhibited beast but because he achieves balance between body and mind. Such a New Man is not a slave to his drives but a conscious lord over himself.” If the “Superman” were understood in this sense, “he would conform not with the future bourgeois but with the future proletarian, a ‘Co-Man,’ not a ‘Superman.’ ”¹³² Uniting the sexes, the New Man was also to unite classes, joining the intelligentsia sense of individuality with the proletarian sense of fraternity. In Gredeskul’s vision, the new intelligentsia was to say: “We go hand in hand with the toiler, not the exploiter; with him we prevail or perish. The new intelligentsia will discard its intelligentsia exterior and fully endorse the position of the toilers.” And this was precisely what the Bolshevik intelligentsia was doing. “The word ‘Bolshevik’ does not signify a member of a certain party, but Man in general, a Man with unique qualities.” These qualities indicated a hybrid of the best in the intelligentsia and in the proletariat. The 

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Bolshevik intelligentsia cast aside all typically intelligentsia “phantoms,” all intelligentsia “values” and “ideas.” Her “intellectuality” was not reared upon the “fallow ground of prolonged and systematic inactivity.” Rather, “she was connected to the raging of revolutionary, untamed and triumphant activity.” “Intellect” was not a “yoke placed upon her will but a wonderful, resolute regulator of action.” In a word, this intelligentsia-turned-proletariat was to be “free from any internal falsity.” Different from the effeminate “mental prostitute,” she “believes in resisting with a fist, a rifle, a machine gun!” As s/he became active, the “new intelligentsia” took on masculine features.¹³³ The New Man’s attitude toward the world was to be Apollonian, driven towards individuation and self-creation. Instead of seeking the power that dissolves the self (what the Dionysian female/intelligentsia was dreaming about), Apollo “seeks power as a creative manifestation of his own selfhood.”¹³⁴ Instead of dissolving into nature, the New Man was to conquer nature and become God. In this vision the proud Nietzschean Marxist visionary creature was to create its own world out of itself, not in harmony with the intelligentsia with her cosmic, ethical imperatives, but in opposition to her. In short, the individuation of the New Man was to be enlarged until it encompassed everything, experiencing its own strength as the root of value. By elevating pride to an ideal, Marx “committed himself to the causa sui project, to man’s creation of himself as divine.”¹³⁵ Trampling on external sources of identity, self-consciousness became the highest divinity, opening the road to the “dialectic of aggrandizement”—a theory of emancipation that transformed pride into a cosmogonic principle. It was proletarian might that gave Prometheus “his inner autarkic independence from the gods, his sense of self-awareness.” Marxists envisioned the New Man as “a fightertitan who strains all his muscles in order to change the face of the earth . . . the Man-God, the conscious tsar of nature.”¹³⁶ Was such an autonomous, self-generating New Man possible? I am not referring here to the practical difficulties faced by the Russian Marxists in realizing their vision of the new social order; rather, my goal is to probe the internal coherence of the Nietzchean Marxist description of the New Man. What is at stake is the poetics that conceptualizes the ideal type of New Man, an issue that obviously precedes the problem of how the ideal should be made into the real. The problem that undid Gredeskul, we should note at the outset, was the problem of gender. Utopias are profoundly homosocial. The utopian ideal of the French revolutionaries, as described by Lynn 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

Hunt, for example, “was based on a notion of fraternity between men. Public virtue requires virility, which requires in turn the violent rejection . . . of any intrusion of the feminine into the public.” Similarly, Andrei Platonov envisioned Communism exclusively as a “society of men.”¹³⁷ Gredeskul stumbled over the utopian quest for sexual purity, which he wanted to uphold. Describing the New Man as entirely autonomous, he would have liked him to be male. But Gredeskul undercut such a possibility by showing that, in order to develop an identity, the New Man needed an external element against which he could define himself, and this turned out to be the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia’s femininity polluted him, at the same time as “she” constituted “him.” The reader will recall that the New Man conjured up by Gredeskul was something like an androgyne. A “creature” that mixed sexes, it—or rather s/he—was at a far remove from the ideal of sexual purity. Gredeskul’s failure to develop a coherent plan for the Bolshevik utopia was inexorably linked with his inability to separate the feminine from the masculine in the ideal society of the future. The enterprise was doomed. As a futuristic and utopian creature, the New Man had to be pure. By contrast, the present in which the utopian visionary wrote was impure. Gredeskul was aware that the contaminated present should have been separated from the pure future. “The individuals of the present do not fit this future, a future of social solidarity. Living under the old conditions, they formed themselves in a certain way and froze in this form.” The author tried desperately to seal off his image of a utopian future so that it would remain uncontaminated by the imperfections of his own time: “The future will consist of individuals who do not resemble the individuals of the present; they will think differently, feel differently, have different characters, and different relations among themselves than we do. . . . Into the promised land of the new humanity only new kinds of individuals can enter because only they can turn it into what it should be.” The old man was not to live to see paradise, perhaps because he could not change himself enough to deserve it. Gredeskul invoked a Russian saying to this effect: “A hunchback is cured only by the grave.”¹³⁸ As Eric Naiman has pointed out, however, such utopias are plagued with paradox: “A constant feature in the description of would-be perfect worlds is the isolation of the ideal kingdom; the authors of utopian projects frequently seek to frame their descriptions with protective narratives.” The very fact of description, however, harbors the seed for the utopia’s disintegration. “Utopias 

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are infected by linguistic and historical transmission.” The question of transmission could not be circumvented because the composer of the utopia had always to address the link between the flawed present and the perfect future. At this point two concerns clash: on one hand the future must be utopian in the sense of being ideal, but on the other it could not be utopian in the sense of being beyond reach. Naiman rightly argues that no matter how fierce the effort to seal off utopias, “attempts to describe (or effect) an historical transmission are bound to fail, for historical—like linguistic—transmission necessarily shatters the pure isolation required by utopias for their continued survival as ideals.”¹³⁹ When Gredeskul asserted that the present humanity was “only a bridge to genuine humanity, a conduit, destroyed once it had served its role, so that a return was not possible,” he did not realize that the bridge could never be dispensed with. The proletarian kingdom Gredeskul aimed at could not leave the intelligentsia behind, no matter how hard everybody tried. Acting as the faculty of thinking, the intelligentsia (Gredeskul himself admitted) was simply indispensable if the proletariat was to regain its proper identity. “The ideology of the Proletarian Revolution is based on scholarship. Far from being denied, knowledge had to be acknowledged as our highest authority.”¹⁴⁰ Here we can turn to the symbolic rape through which Gredeskul articulated the revolutionary encounter between the proletariat and the intelligentsia. The rapist performed an act of extreme violence against his victim, achieving her complete subjugation and proving his virility and physical superiority in the process. At face value, the female was deprived of control over the locus of her identity, which was overtaken by the male. At the same time, however, the male’s actions were proof of his dependence on his victim. The victim could not be annihilated once and for all but had to go on existing in order to be constantly resubjugated. Extinction of the female would have made confirmation of masculinity impossible. The proletariat’s attitude toward the intelligentsia was similar to the rapist’s attitude toward his victim: he was aggressively resentful—the intelligentsia reminded the proletarian of his alienation, the sojourn of the proletarian essence out of the working class itself, as well as of his dependency on the intelligentsia, whose appropriation was the only way the proletariat could achieve self-knowledge. Hence the demand that the intelligentsia must merge with the mass. Naiman’s study of “the case of Chubarov Alley,” which evolved around an actual case of rape, merits a brief examination because it helps us understand 

The Janus-Faced Messiah

how the Nietzschean Marxist imagination linked the rape of the female with the rape of the intelligentsia. The facts were straightforward: a gang of Leningrad youngsters abducted a young woman, referred to as “Love” (Liubov’), took her to a vacant lot and brutally raped her. Subsequent medical examination determined that the victim was infected with venereal disease. Examining the poetics employed by the official press covering the case, Naiman shows persuasively that gender categories were well suited to express the obsession of the Bolshevik utopian mentality with proletarian purity. It was not surprising that the larger concern with ideological purity “should have found expression in frenzied talk about sex. ‘Pregnant’ with the imagery of penetration and disease, sexuality was a natural topic for the . . . necessarily paradoxical thinking of a society supposedly on the way to the ideal.” The constant concern with sex indeed “may be read as despair about grander impurities.” Intercourse with another, involving as it did the opening up of physical boundaries, carried with it the horrors of venereal disease, which “also signifies a larger horror”—the fear of being infected by that “with which one has become intimate.”¹⁴¹ Could it be, however, that the “larger horror” Naiman alludes to is the anxiety of the proletarian that he was infected along with the intelligentsia? Indeed, Naiman himself suggests the possibility of a class reading of the rape narrative, when he notes that the rapists in the Chubarov Alley case were industrial workers from a factory called Cooperator. This, as well as the fact that the rape was perpetrated by a gang, implies the rapists were aware that proletarian identity calls for collectivism. “What, after all, was the gang rape in Chubarov Alley and the infection of Liubov’ if not a collective act?” Were workers not directed to “bridge the gap between the individual and the collective, to end the situation in which a worker’s ‘narrowly personal life lies beyond the threshold of our collectives’?” As if in compliance with this directive, the rapists merged individual and collective. The Chubarov affair, Naiman maintains, was indeed a collective action of “members” (in Russian chlen has the same sexual connotation as “member” in English). Furthermore, in the reports of the transmission of venereal disease, “with their vivid evocation of disease leaping from one proletarian’s genitalia to another’s, a homoerotic fascination is apparent, for in these accounts the rapists virtually engage in collective intercourse—not only with the victim but also with each other, through the vehicle of a passive, symbolic object named Love.” The rape of Liubov’ and the use of her body as a mediating vessel were indis

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pensable to the bonding of the rapists/workers and the construction of their masculine/proletarian identity. What Naiman ignores is that Liubov’ was not simply a peasant girl but also a student in the workers’ faculty and, as such, a member of the new intelligentsia.¹⁴² In the present context, it is more rewarding to understand the rape of Liubov’ as “the primal scene” not just of a specific Bolshevik policy (the alliance—smychka—of the proletariat with the peasantry in the s), Naiman’s point, but as a primal scene of the proletarian emancipatory project itself. Sharing Liubov’ ’s body, the Chubarov male workers also shared in the knowledge she had acquired in the workers’ faculty. In other words, they were seeking Liubov’’s capacity to think out her proletarian identity. The femininity of the rape victim matched the gendered character of knowledge that somehow had to be appropriated by the working class without feminizing him. Rephrasing Naiman’s striking conclusion (“in the society of Chubarov’s Alley, women are virtually eliminated—the only one who remains has just a single function: to facilitate the intercourse of men with men”), we might say that in Communist society the intelligentsia was disposed of even as it was preserved in order to execute its sole role of initiating workers into their proletarian self-knowledge.¹⁴³ The Nietzschean Marxist poetics suggests that the proletariat/intelligentsia nexus embodied two interdependent concepts, which were linked as inexorably as were the concepts of male and female. To be himself, the proletariat had to appropriate the intelligentsia and take on her mind. But while trampling the intelligentsia down in his quest to be casua sui, the proletariat came to realize that he could not be “himself ” without “her.” A self-generating grandeur eluding him, even Prometheus turned out to be dependent on another to know what he was. Proletarian Self-Emancipation: A Cul-de-Sac

At this stage, we can take a second look at the parallels between the Christian and the Marxist versions of redemption. In the Christian narrative, emancipation was defined as between man and God. For the moderns, on the other hand, and Marxists among them, emancipation was autonomous human action. The French philosopher François Lyotard addresses the issue: To be emancipated means to escape from the state of lack. By freeing himself from the tutelage of the other, the one-handed regains the upper hand. He



The Janus-Faced Messiah thinks that he is healing his castration. This dream—that of being finished with lack—is the one giving rise to emancipation today. To be done with that which I lack, that which I miss, that which made me lacking, that which makes me lack. . . . As for this point, that emancipation is the listening to the real [emancipator], Jews and Christians are in agreement, and it is this agreement which ruptures Modernity. Modernity, on the other hand, tries to think of and carry out emancipation without the other. . . . Self-constitution consists of establishing oneself through full possession of knowledge. . . . The emancipated ones are the persons . . . that owe nothing to anyone but themselves. . . . [The modern] emancipation claims to be freed from the anxiety procured by consciousness of ontological arrogance. Man, it is thought, must do nothing but free himself, which he owes to himself alone. Only in this way does he respect himself and is he respectable.¹⁴⁴

The Marxist myth of emancipation was modern. The shackled proletarian was to break his chains and redeem himself. Like Prometheus, he was supposed to disobey the gods and rebel against their tutelage. In the famous words of the Communist Manifesto, “the liberation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves.” Lyotard observes that, according to the terms of modernity, emancipators are recognized only in order to be denied. “Therefore, they are thought of as individual cases, modeled, represented and treated as scenarios. One emancipates oneself from the other by placing him outside oneself, and then by getting one’s hands on him.”¹⁴⁵ But, as we have seen, the arrogant Promethean ambition of self-generation undermines itself at the very moment it is spoken. The division between emancipator and emancipated, the subject and the object of action, cannot be overcome. In one Marxist formulation, the object of emancipation was the intelligentsia, a purely spiritual entity that needed embodiment by a material force to actualize itself. The subject of emancipation, in this formulation, was the proletariat, which supplied the intelligentsia with “heart.” Alternatively, the object of emancipation could be said to be the proletariat, “the essence of being,” which needed to be “redeemed,” while the subject of emancipation was the intelligentsia, which told the proletariat what it really was. In either case, the schizoid nature of the subject was apparent: the proletariat remained severed, hovering between essence and appearance; men as saved (human essence) was inscribed in man as fallen (human appearance) and directed the latter toward salvation. Despite his Promethean quest for selfsufficiency, Marx reproduced the Christian savior/saved duality. The story of



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emancipation in Marxism was a story of Gnosis, of consciousness overcoming economic interest and sublating desire. To cite Lyotard again, “the modern ideal of emancipation confounds all the orders so as to secure full possession of knowledge, will, and feeling. Whoever or whatever owes nothing, save to himself, will be emancipated, freed from all debt to the other.”¹⁴⁶ At the end, the proletariat was bound to attain self-knowledge and with it full freedom. As long as the proletariat did not know itself, however, only the intelligentsia knew the true proletariat, only the intelligentsia could show the proletariat the path to salvation. The intelligentsia—no divine entity lying outside and beyond the proletariat but its very essence—could not be ontologically different from the proletariat. But, and this is crucial for the argument regarding the structural resemblance between the notion of the intelligentsia and the Gnostic notion of the divine messenger, the intelligentsia was external to the proletariat. The relation between the proletariat and the intelligentsia depended on that notion so beautifully presented in Plato’s Symposium—simultaneous identity and difference: had there been just identity, there would have been no narrative, no Marxist scenario of the human journey toward redemption; had there been an ontological difference, the dream of self-emancipation without reliance on an outside deity would have made no sense. And yet, just formulated, this myth—precisely because it attempted to hold the stick at both ends, to have the intelligentsia both within and outside the proletariat—breaks into pieces.¹⁴⁷

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The “Intelligentsia” Vicissitudes of the Notion

3

THE MEANING of the term “intelligentsia” was far from immutable between the s and the s. Tracing developments in the revolutionary discourse over a span of three decades, I would like, in the present chapter, to sketch a brief history of “the intelligentsia” in Russian Marxism. Such a history, however, is not susceptible to straightforward chronological presentation. Notions do not develop in the same way biographies do. The main events in the history of notions cannot be precisely defined, let alone dated. Thus, new definitions of the intelligentsia did not simply coincide with the familiar milestones in the history of the Russian Social Democratic organization. Rather, they were a deferred effect of such events in the realm of the symbolic. I will trace how the formation of the Russian working class, the foundation of the Social Democratic party, and the Russian Revolutions affected the notion of the intelligentsia, showing how these momentous transformations altered the discursive field in which the “intelligentsia” was given meaning. We shall see the intelligentsia evolving not as a social group, which supposedly underwent changes in its composition, economic status, or political orientation, but as a category. In this chapter I move away from the prior synchronic perspective and assume a more traditional perspective of a diachronic-minded historian. In the following discussion, I carefully avoid mixing sources or time periods. The discussion opens with Legal Marxism, a defined group of thinkers who wrote during approximately the same time, and clearly participated in the same discourse. Then it moves to Lenin and his rivals: all texts here come from around  and are authored by members or sympathizers of the Russian Social 

   “             ”:                      

Democratic party. The discussion ends with the early Soviet debate on the intelligentsia, again a series of exchanges clearly circumspect in time and place. Another possible misconception the previous emphasis on Marxist discursive solidarity might have fostered is the impression that all Russian Marxists understood “the intelligentsia” to mean the same thing. I argue nothing of the kind. Virtually all Social Democratic splinter groups produced their own interpretations of the notion, claiming that theirs was the only legitimate, Marxist one. In comparing various Marxist and near Marxist positions on “the intelligentsia question,” one can assess the depth and significance of the disagreements over the identity of the intelligentsia and the role this entity should assume at every eschatological juncture.

Legal Marxists on the “Intelligentsia” Legal Marxism was a short-lived nonconspiratorial intellectual trend that lasted from the s to the early s, which dissolved into liberalism, philosophy, and academic economics.¹ Purging Marxism of all “unscientific” value judgments, its adherents deduced the inevitable entrenchment of capitalism in Russia on the basis of “objective” economic laws only. But the claim that values were mere reflections of basic mechanical processes denied Legal Marxists the means of justifying their intellectual position on ethical grounds. Intellectual exchange was emptied of transcendent meaning. Any theoretical discussion (the domain of the intelligentsia) was presented as a field of automatons spitting out opinions—“ideational by-products” of an autonomous and uncontrollable economic metabolism. The economic determinism lying at the base of Legal Marxist thought created an irresolvable tension between the Marxist science, which reduced ideas to the interests of their class bearers (and thus made them particularist and unethical), and Marxist ethics, which praised transcendence and universalism. Ultimately, the contention that all ideas were motivated by interests was turned against the Legal Marxists themselves and led to their being condemned as particularists. The realization that “as a strict science Marxism can offer no ethical guidance” led Struve, one of the founders of Legal Marxism, to conclude that “scientific socialism” was simply “one big utopia.”² The attempts of the Legal Marxists to define the intelligentsia scientifically went to the heart of this problem. They debated whether the intelligentsia represented the interests of mental laborers, or whether the ideas of the in

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

telligentsia transcended the context of their production and successfully arrived at the general essence of the historical process. Aleksander Izgoev, at the time a Marxist sociologist, undertook an examination of “the intelligentsia” with all the rigors of economic materialism. Positing the existence of four classes, corresponding to the modes of participation in the production process (physical labor, intellectual labor, industrial ownership, and land ownership), Izgoev maintained that “mental workers” (umstvennye rabotniki) were an independent class. At the same time, however, he was compelled to add that “the intelligentsia must be singled out from the class of mental laborers.” While sensing the danger of replacing a sociological definition of the intelligentsia with an ethical one, Izgoev wished at the same time to preserve a sense of the intelligentsia’s peculiarity. To solve this problem, he offered a seemingly objective definition of the intelligentsia—“educators, that professional group which transmits knowledge to the people.” But Izgoev’s justification of his subclassification tacitly reintroduced ethics into sociology. The special attention he paid to the “educators” was clearly based on the popular conviction that they were altruists who dedicated their lives to linking the laboring classes with their history. Izgoev’s attempt to supply a vocabulary that would disassociate the Marxist universalist prophet like himself from mental workers in general, and enable Marxists to treat the intelligentsia as a class among classes, one particularist group among many, was bound to flounder. Faced with the choice of either returning to the intelligentsia its historiosophic significance or giving up the claim that his “scientific analysis” was relevant to the project of universal enlightenment, Izgoev reinscribed an ethical agency into his picture of the objective, morally indifferent world.³ Izgoev was not alone in his failure. The literary critic Vladimir Shuliatnikov attempted a similar interpretation of the intelligentsia as a socioeconomic entity, a variety of the petite bourgeoisie.⁴ Defining knowledge not as “labor power” but as the “means of intellectual production,” Shuliatnikov rendered the intelligentsia a servant of capital. Once Shuliatnikov made the intelligentsia an object of economic study, however, he was unable to improve on Izgoev without undercutting his own position. Hence the disclaimer at the end of his pamphlet: “When we speak of the professional intelligentsia we, of course, do not have in mind the ideologists of the proletarian masses proper —a different issue altogether and one that lies outside the present study.”⁵ Shuliatnikov’s “ideologists,” much like Izgoev’s “educators,” had to remain outside the class typology so that the analysis would appear general and scien

   “             ”:                      

tific. In the same vein, Zaitsev saved the term “ideologist” for “those members of the intelligentsia who represented classes to which they did not belong,” that is, for the universalistically committed intellectuals. But he too was forced to make the embarrassing admission that the Marxist hardcore science of economics “cannot yet explain what produces ideologists. It seems that their genesis is somehow patterned after the way geniuses emerge—a mystical event overall.”⁶ The most extensive discussion of the intelligentsia in Legal Marxist literature can be found in the work of the economist Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii. In the late s, to which the articles discussed below belong, TuganBaranovskii was drifting away from Legal Marxism; still, his theoretical bent and independence from working class battles left him outside the Social Democratic camp. While demonstrating the ubiquity of economic interests in turn-of-the-century Russia, Tugan-Baranovskii opposed attempts to assign a class interest to the intelligentsia: “Unique in its wide spiritual horizon and its capacity for abstract thinking, and bereft of egotism . . . the intelligentsia can rise above the confines of estate and class and represent the general interest of society. . . . The most responsive to theoretical considerations due to its professional makeup, the intelligentsia adopts political positions based on scientific considerations.” It is surprising, given his economist premise, that Tugan-Baranovskii acknowledged that a materially disinterested social agent can exist. Undertaking a paradoxical attempt to provide a socioeconomic explanation to the operation of a supraclass entity, he evoked the canonic Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in which Marx explained how Napoleon III, despite the absence of support from any social class, managed to achieve supremacy by taking advantage of a stalemate in the class struggle. Marx thus provided his Russian followers with a precedent for a situation where material determinations cancel each other out and produce a political entity suspended above the class structure. What Marx attributed to Napoleon III Tugan-Baranovskii attributed to the “intelligentsia drawn from various ranks” (raznochinskaia intelligentsiia), with the important difference that the latter was benevolent to the object described. Subjected to contradictory forces, Tugan-Baranovskii argued, intelligentsia drawn from various ranks remained stuck between classes. “Hovering above the economic structure it is a conglomerate of professional groups with no determinate class color.” Noticing that “declassed” (deklassirovanaia, a Marxist term), which Tugan-Baranovskii uncharacteristically used in a positive sense, and “supra

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

class” (vne-klassovaia, a Populist term) both referred to an absence of social determination, Tugan-Baranovskii congratulated himself on the completion of his Marxist salto mortale. Believing he had provided an objective foundation for the Populist subjectivist claim that the intelligentsia stood above classes, Tugan-Baranovskii cited Lavrov with approval: The intelligentsia is not a socioeconomic but a socioethical category. . . . If the socioethical sense of the term tacitly joins in the social consciousness with the completely different socioeconomic sense—intelligentsia as a group of mental laborers—this confluence shows that in Russia the leading representatives of the “thinking proletariat” are critically thinking personalities, dedicated fighters in the name of the ideal of general equality and happiness.

Coming close to squaring a circle, Tugan-Baranovskii was happy to explain how the intelligentsia could be seen as a class devoid of class interests thus remaining loyal to the framework of the Marxist social science.⁷ Standing outside the organized Social Democratic movement and lacking an institutionalized messiah to draw legitimacy from, Tugan-Baranovskii and his Legal Marxist peers had to identify with the intelligentsia in general if they wished to claim they transcended class interests and provided a valid evaluation of the situation in Russia. The universalist perspective of the intelligentsia alone could anchor the objective validity of the Legal Marxist epistemology.

What Was the “Party”? As long as Russia remained outside the purview of capitalism, “the intelligentsia” preserved its supraclass meaning. But following the industrialization of the s and the concomitant “development of capitalism in Russia,” Marxists posited that “the intelligentsia” had divided along class lines. Once the Russian Social Democratic movement came into existence, a new linguistic entity intruded into the semantics of the Marxist revolutionary discourse, with the purpose of resolving the tension between the heterogeneous senses of the “intelligentsia.” The Party (the new term designating the universalist vanguard) stripped “the intelligentsia” of its meaning as the bearer of consciousness, leaving it only the negative meaning of a subservient intellectual caste.⁸ In the Communist Manifesto, Marx defined “the Party” as the agency that brought the proletariat and socialist theory together. But for such a crucial 

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mediation to occur, the class-messiah had to exist already, at least in its rudimentary, “in-itself ” form. Although the existence in Russia of a proletariat worthy of the name was a matter of debate for a while, toward  a number of Russian Marxists concluded that the long-awaited native proletariat had assumed flesh and blood form. The famous radical Vera Zasulich enthusiastically exclaimed: “The Russian worker is no more obtuse and foolish by nature than any other worker! The Russian intelligentsia . . . must dedicate itself to the workers’ movement now.” George Plekhanov, a seasoned revolutionary and a recent convert to Marxism, seconded her view: “Everyone who has encountered a Russian worker recently knows how responsive he has become.”⁹ As to the question of how to utilize the nascent working class, Russian Marxists were keen to follow in the footsteps of the Western Social Democratic movement. Marxism offered a universal historical narrative but permitted national histories a measure of autonomy, assuming that eventually the separate streams of national socialisms would flow into the ocean of world Revolution. Learning from their forerunners, the “backward” SocialDemocratic movements attempted to emulate their more “advanced” counterparts. Fostered by the Marxist typological exegesis, this comparative framework allowed Russian Marxists to establish historic parallels between the history of the Western Social Democracy and the current situation in their country.¹⁰ Taking theoretical cues from their Western European counterparts and believing that the Paris Commune signified the shift of French Social Democracy from a movement dominated by the intelligentsia to an autonomous proletarian political formation, the Russian Marxists searched for an analogous event of their own. If in  Aksel’rod still lamented the “backwardness of Russian working-class consciousness in comparison to the West,” in  he already sounded more optimistic: “The massive participation of our workers in the May Day demonstration . . . demonstrates that they are embracing the principles of international Social Democracy.” Aksel’rod maintained that the “thinking” and “feeling” of the Russian working class were finally on a par with the proletarian soul in Germany and France.¹¹ The key thesis of Marxist eschatology—that capitalism led to the intensification of the class struggle—appeared to have been vindicated, prompting Plekhanov to make his epochal statement at the First Congress of the Socialist International in  that “the Russian Revolution will succeed as a workers’ revolution or it will not succeed at all.” At about the same time Martov, his 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

junior by many years, declared that the working class will be “the hegemon over the democratic forces in the tsarist empire.”¹² Now that the native proletariat had assumed real form and the Marxist intelligentsia could call on the material forces necessary to realize the eschatological scheme, Russia was ready for the creation of a Social Democratic Party of its own. When a leading Marxist journal announced that the time had come to move beyond agitation circles and form a party, the journal assumed the Russian Marxists “have now not only abstract elements of class consciousness” (which the intelligentsia had already been blessed with for quite some time) but also the capacity to establish a “tangible link with the working masses.”¹³ What was new at the beginning of the twentieth century was the readiness of a loosely organized bunch of alienated propagandists to pass the eschatological task of injecting workers with consciousness on to a concrete organization, one armed with a program, a statute, and a press organ. The Party did not abolish the intelligentsia but organized it and gave it a corporeal structure pushing the messianic idea toward realization. “The workers’ Party alone,” wrote Plekhanov, “is capable of saving our intelligentsia from its present practical impotence, . . . by drawing the most progressive elements into the political struggle.” The Party embodied the proletarian spirit in a tangible institution and the workers were invited to reach out to it for guidance and support. The spontaneous working-class movement, stated Martov, “had to be directed by the Party henceforth.” Explaining that the transition of the proletariat from the “in-itself ” to the “for-itself ” mode of existence could not occur spontaneously, the Marxist literary critic Vorovskii was emphatic that it was dangerous to postpone the creation of a Party and leave the nascent working class untended. “Dissolved in the unconscious and semiconscious mass and set on the road to broadening its economic demands . . . our workers might be lured away from the road toward classconsciousness!”¹⁴ What is most interesting here is how the eschatological time reckoning asserted itself throughout this thinking: Russian Marxists never doubted that at some point the proletariat would appear and, having united with the Marxist intelligentsia, would attain full consciousness and realize Communism. The steps along the way were clear—the articulation of the idea, its dissemination among the workers, the creation of the revolutionary party, the Revolution itself, and so on. The real question had to do with timing: How close was Russia to the End of History? The Marxist conception of “the Party” had little in common with the lib

   “             ”:                      

eral notion of a political party—a pragmatic political organization representing a concrete constituency. The Social Democratic press was very clear in this regard: “Our Party is the leader of the proletarian movement, not a passive servant of immediate proletarian demands.”¹⁵ Lenin, following Marx closely, disregarded the opinions of an empirical proletariat if it fell short of the proletarian as the reason of history: “It is immaterial what this or that proletarian or even the entire proletariat presently imagines its aims to be. What is important is what it is and what according to its being it will be compelled by history to do.” Trotsky wrote in the same vein: “The Party expresses the basic interests of the working class . . . through the revolutionary vanguard which, when necessary, compels the laggard tail to catch up with the head.”¹⁶ For liberals, a “party” mediates between citizen and the state, an openended role central to liberal politics; for Marxists, the “Party” mediates between the Promethean soul, buried under different forms within the “body politic” (man as “subject to the tsar,” man as “citizen,” and so on), and its salvation in Communism, which is free of all politics.¹⁷ In the words of Alan Besançon: “The legitimacy of the Communist Party lay in Communism. So far as workers . . . were concerned, the Party did not represent anything other than the glowing future toward which it was leading them. It could not compromise with society on the level of shared interests nor even govern in its own private interests, because the Party only exists in the fiction of the total dedication of its own private interests to the common interest . . . called Communism.”¹⁸ The “Party” was not a mundane institution representing a present social force, but a messianic order, burdened with the task of purifying society in the name of the future community. Since all that was real had to be destroyed before a new reality could manifest itself, a genuine redemptive force could only act on the real in a destructive way. The Party had to forge a program that the proletariat, in its ideal form, would have recognized as its own. It was supposed to incarnate the spirit of salvation as long as the class-messiah remained unaware of itself.¹⁹ In eschatological terms, the existence of the Party marked at the same time the lingering gap between the proletariat “in itself ” and the proletariat “for itself ” (without such a gap the Party would have been superfluous) and the creation of an agent charged with closing this gap. Like Christ, both human and divine, the Party was, at one and the same time, a real institution and an incarnated idea. The formation of the Party was the First Coming; not fully appreciated by an im

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

mature working class, it heralded a Second Coming and the apotheosis of workers’ consciousness at which point all workers would join the Party, thereby rendering it superfluous. The eschatological significance of the Party explained the zeal with which the Marxists guarded its purity. Proletarian spirit could manifest itself within different forms at different times (a sacred text, a revolutionary intelligentsia, a party) but two entities—whether political platforms, parties, or factions within a party—could never be imbued with the Truth simultaneously. Since history had a single course to take, its spirit could only be carried by a single vehicle. Hence Lenin’s determination to purge his organization of all opposition, even when the result was the reduction of the Bolshevik Party to little more than a small coterie of isolated emigrants. Marxist factionalism is explained by each group’s proclivity to believe that it alone held the recipe to emancipation and that the Revolution depended upon maintaining the purity of its own ideas. What was important was not the size of the Party organization, which was expected to grow once history had announced itself, but the Party’s loyalty to the historical task of the proletariat. Renegades were considered absolutely evil since everyone who hindered emancipation acted the role of Satan’s emissary. Acrimonious political debate and frequent internal splits accompanied all Marxist movements. Historians who blame the organizational divisiveness of Russian Social Democracy on the specificity of Lenin’s conception of the Party are inspired by a retrospective agenda that traces Soviet authoritarianism to its Bolshevik seeds. A logical inference from a need to consolidate and protect the redemptive capacity of the proletariat, the Bolshevik theory of Party organization cohered with Marxism and should therefore hardly be construed as a unique distortion. Lenin laid emphasis on the final goal of the revolutionary movement—increasingly neglected by those who, when speaking of “proletarian class consciousness,” meant “not that rational understanding of modern society and its workings which the term denoted to Marx, but rather the workers’ pride in their class and their devotion to the daily struggle for civil rights and social benefits.”²⁰ The Bolsheviks did not invent political messianism but, seeking the preservation of Marxist universalism, assiduously rejected particularist interpretations of the proletarian agenda. The Marxists presented the turn-of-the-century years as an important watershed in the history of “the intelligentsia.” The bourgeois pseudointelligentsia, shaken by the proletarian strikes and uprisings in the early 

   “             ”:                      

years of the twentieth century, suddenly became aware of its own economic interests and abandoned the advocacy of universal emancipation. From then on, the bourgeois intelligentsia joined hands only infrequently with the proletarian movement, and then only with the narrow goal of toppling autocracy. The only intelligentsia that remained loyal to its historical mission was the Marxist intelligentsia. What was to be the relation between the workers and the intelligentsia within the Party itself? Did the intelligentsia have to vacate the scene? These were now the burning questions. In  Aksel’rod dedicated an entire brochure to the defense of the intelligentsia’s role in the Party. “Comrades who dedicate all their time to the education and the political unification of the proletariat,” he wrote, “should be on an equal footing with working-class comrades even if they come from the intelligentsia.” And elsewhere: “the ultimate judges in our movement should be Party members . . . regardless of the difference between the intelligentsia and workers.” Another Social Democrat, Kol’tsov, was similarly inclined in : “The main danger the Russian workers’ movement is faced with is dearth of knowledge and not the pretensions of the intelligentsia to leadership.”²¹ More and more voices, however, began to express unhappiness with the persistent presence of the intelligentsia in what was supposed to be a workers’ party. Gurevich reminded his readers that members of the intelligentsia were little more than “various bourgeois well-wishers who, ascribing an inflated importance to the intelligentsia, wanted to play down the proletarianclass character of the contemporary workers’ movement.” Beloruss, another contemporary pamphleteer, qualified in : “We do not see every worker as an apostle of goodness, ethical purity and justice. It was frequently proven that isolated bourgeois . . . can renounce class privileges and dedicate themselves body and soul to the suffering and the downtrodden. All this being said, the proletariat cannot rely on them because they are as rare as white ravens.”²² The Social Democratic press explained that “for decades the worker was only a child in need of the radical intelligentsia’s tutelage. The intelligentsia spoke and acted in the name of the proletariat, paralyzing the mind and will of the workers.” But times were changing and the relations between the workers and the intelligentsia had to change as well: “The more its class consciousness grows, the less the proletariat is inclined to endure any sort of dictatorship over itself, including a dictatorship exercised by the intelligentsia 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

and ostensibly designed for the proletariat’s own benefit.” Speaking in the name of the working class, Bulkin, a Menshevik “worker,” reacted to the intelligentsia with boundless indignation: “Our intelligentsia leaders have never . . . made it their primary task to develop the consciousness and independent activity of those workers with whom they came into fairly close contact. . . . Consciously or not, they systematically persecuted all workers’ striving for a bottom-up activity. It was on this ungrateful soil that an unhappy antagonism between workers and the intelligentsia has arisen.” Bulkin urged the workers to release themselves from the “intelligentsia tutelage” and spoke about the danger of the “intelligentsia takeover” in the Party. According to Bulkin, “it is the intelligentsia that is responsible for infecting the Russian Social Democracy with factionism.”²³ Anonymous publicists were now asking themselves: “Why do we say that revolutionary workers are a product of intelligentsia agitation? General economic conditions are the main contributor to the creation of a proletarian-revolutionary type—the strike organizer.”²⁴ Nadezhdin also maintained that workers’ inferiority complex vis-à-vis the intelligentsia was baseless: “The contemporary revolutionary worker has more advice to give the underground agitator than to take from him. On the whole, the intelligentsia is barely conscious and not at all independent in its thinking. It is about time that the workers educated the intelligentsia. . . . In doing so, workers would stride forward, not backward.”²⁵ According to the Marxist master narrative, the experience of the First Russian Revolution had served to repel workers from their erstwhile mentors. An open letter that “workers” sent to Gorky around  accused the intelligentsia of defecting to the nonproletarian parties. “The time when a vast portion of the intelligentsia adulated the worker and absorbed his ideology, shared his griefs and went to serve him, faded into oblivion.” Large portions of the intelligentsia came to identify with the bourgeoisie. According to Kleinbort, a prominent Marxist literati, “careerism and pleasure seeking depraved our older sister. . . . The proletariat no longer lived up to the expectations of the intelligentsia. The latter developed a taste for life . . . finding it now more pleasant to sit in the theater’s front row than to criss-cross Siberia at the government’s expense.” In analyzing “intelligentsia treason” Kleinbort used the best tools of Marxist social science: “Before the revolution [of ] the proletariat had not yet found itself, allowing the intelligentsia to dominate the Social Democratic movement. But since then two developments have occurred: first, workers have grown their own vanguard; and second, the 

   “             ”:                      

intelligentsia has discarded the illusions fostered by its amorphous class consciousness and has gone on to subject itself spiritually to capital, transforming into a part of the bourgeoisie.”²⁶ Responding to Kleinbort, Kornei Chukovski, later a famous Soviet writer, confessed: “Having appeared on the historical scene only recently, these halfignorant destitutes [people’s intelligentsia] took over the heritage of our ancestors. What had been bequested to us we renounced. They, and they alone, are the true intelligentsia of today! . . . Scrutinize what they scribble and you will find the old intelligentsia pathos, the old intelligentsia banners we have already forgotten.” Believing that the first Russian Revolution marked the “dissolution of the intelligentsia” Martov declared in , Always underneath the question of the role and meaning of the Russian intelligentsia, so frequently discussed in the s, s and s, lay more specific questions about social and political struggles. The Slavophile and Westernizer debates were specifically about the political pretensions of the cultured part of the bourgeoisie and land-owning classes. . . . As the revolution drew near, as time progressed to the moment of overt class struggle, the debates on the subject of the intelligentsia took on a less and less abstract character; the sociopolitical meaning of the debates increasingly emerged in the consciousness of the debaters.²⁷

According to Martov, class conflict is first expressed in the form of debate and then in actuality. The social process, therefore, is a progression from thought (the “intelligentsia”) to action (working-class rebellion). Martov argued that to discuss the role of the intelligentsia after  was to move “backward” along the eschatological route, to regress to a time before the revolution, when class struggle was expressed in words rather than “from behind a barricade.” In Martov’s metahistorical narrative, the historical intelligentsia had been engaged merely in a symbolic struggle against autocracy and its reactionary supporters. During the revolution of , class struggle had become reality and the intelligentsia finally found the force necessary to realize its messianic aims.²⁸ “The political significance of the workers’ movement clearly appearing at the end of the s and the beginning of the twentieth century forced a large part of the Russian intelligentsia to refresh and renovate its old ‘socialist’ sympathies. . . . It became obvious that without the working class, the intelligentsia could not achieve a political overthrow in Russia.” After , to follow Martov’s logic, the intelligentsia became a



The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

spent force. The Menshevik leader did not include the intelligentsia in his configuration of future class struggle because the intelligentsia had already infused its socialist consciousness into the working class. Assuming that overt class war, unfolding in the tsarist empire with increasing intensity, entailed the alignment of individuals according to their material—not intellectual— interests, Martov maintained that the members of the former supraclass intelligentsia would join the class that best served their economic interests.²⁹ Lenin, like Martov, intimated that the “intelligentsia” was an irrelevant and elusive concept after , “an artificial and misleading manner of expression” that the liberals had borrowed from reactionary newspapers. The conflicting social forces in Russia (and in this regard Lenin agreed with his Menshevik rival) were no longer the reactionary elements and the intelligentsia, but the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement. The Bolshevik leader claimed that the liberal intelligentsia could coax the masses into believing the intelligentsia was on their side only as long as the masses lacked consciousness and the intelligentsia could claim to express their goals. Now that the working class had begun to think and act for itself, the discrepancies had become obvious between its aims and the aims of the liberal intelligentsia. “Intelligentsia” became a pejorative label for “intellectuals” or “educated classes” and was often used as an expletive in Lenin’s post- writings.³⁰ What revealed the intelligentsia’s inadequacy at the new stage of Russia’s progression toward the light was its inability to recognize the Party as the new historical vanguard. Trotsky wrote in the aftermath of : History does not repeat itself. No matter how important the intelligentsia used to be, in the future its role can be only auxiliary and subordinate. The heroic substitution of the intelligentsia for the absent proletariat belongs to the epoch which has finally fallen into oblivion. . . . Thanks to the influence of the West, the Idea of the proletariat prefigured the proletariat to a great extent in Russia. The intelligentsia, the carrier of the Idea of the proletariat, found itself linked to the political life of the country not through a class which it wished to serve, but through the Idea of this class. The first circles of the Marxist intelligentsia were no exception in this regard. Only gradually had the spirit assumed flesh. . . . Now the intelligentsia had become an ephemeral and dispensable force. . . . The most significant influx of the intelligentsia into the socialist movement took place during the movement’s infancy. As the Social Democratic Party attracted more real workers, the influx of new elements from the intelligentsia decreased.³¹



   “             ”:                      

Trotsky concluded by implying that those members of the intelligentsia who remained outside the Party failed to grasp the tasks of emancipation, thus becoming false prophets. A careful reading of Trotsky’s post- texts—and this is important— suggests, however, that the members of the intelligentsia who joined the ranks of the Party and agreed to diligently execute all the tasks the Party set were not to be confused with their liberal, treacherous counterparts. Trotsky maintained there was such a thing as a heroic intelligentsia. This was the Marxist intelligentsia that remained loyal to the proletariat: “those rare ideologues, individuals who arrived at socialist convictions guided by pure theoretical thought.” However, in the same breath Trotsky also conceded that such an intelligentsia was bound to feel less comfortable in the Party than workers: “While the worker comes to socialism together with his class, the intelligentsia ideologue must sever the biblical cord that ties him with his class. Less confident, he invariably seeks a large personal influence. . . . At the present time the Social Democratic organization has become an obstacle separating the intelligentsia from socialism. The intelligentsia has become dissatisfied with the Party that demands from it discipline and self-restraint.”³² Whatever their disagreements, all post- Marxists concurred that the intelligentsia had undergone a bifurcation, splitting between the bourgeois intelligentsia (ultimately a retrograde particularist force) and the revolutionary intelligentsia. The course of the Revolution supposedly proved that the Russian proletariat was up for grabs. Immature, it could be coaxed away by the SR and Kadet false messiahs. This doubled the Social Democratic sense of urgency to reach the proletariat first and defeat “the ostensibly ‘people-loving’ but actually retrograde Russian intelligentsia.” The Menshevik Aleksandr Martynov remarked that the most perspicacious leaders of Social Democracy (he had two fellow Mensheviks, Plekhanov and Aksel’rod, in mind) had already predicted that, with the development of capitalism in Russia, “two conscious political powers will crystallize, one liberal and the other Social Democratic,” thus splitting the camp of the intelligentsia.³³ Martov believed that, when push came to shove, “most of the members of the intelligentsia would side with the bourgeoisie.” Consequently, he distinguished between a “bourgeois intelligentsia”—an aggregate of mental laborers, a social-economic category; and a “socialist intelligentsia”—an aggregate of ideologists,



The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion a social-psychological category. The latter distinguished themselves from the bourgeois society by their political ideas. . . . When I understand the intelligentsia as a component of bourgeois society, I counterpose its social interests to the class interests of the proletariat. But this liberal intelligentsia is distinct from the intelligentsia which separated itself from bourgeois society and elected to merge its particularist interests as mental laborers with the universal social interests of the proletariat.³⁴

Calling attention to the duality acquired by the term “intelligentsia,” and warning against the confusion that might arise if the various meanings of the term were used indiscriminately, Martov proposed to distinguish between “intelligentsia” as a denomination for a bourgeois social group and “intelligentsia” as a term describing “ideologists of the proletarian movement.” Again, Lenin concurred with his Menshevik foe. Believing that “the intelligentsia stands on the other side of the proletarian barricade,” he, too, claimed that there remained a “small segment of the intelligentsia that took the proletarian side.” The complexity of the meaning of “intelligentsia” explains why Social Democrats admitted that they “alternated between praise and condemnation of the intelligentsia.” Speaking of “the caste of professional revolutionaries,” Lenin was still assimilating this group into the intelligentsia, “acting as a living connection between epochs, a natural condensation . . . of all human memory.”³⁵ The belief that Russian Social Democracy had surpassed the “intelligentsia stage in its development” enabled the leaders of the workers’ movement to watch with satisfaction what they called the “exodus” of the old intelligentsia from the Party. Kleinbort claimed that “after  the upper-class intelligentsia abandoned the workers’ quarters leaving the working class to itself.” In Lenin’s opinion, the departure of the intelligentsia spelled the “purification of the Party, its relief from the least stable, declassed, untrustworthy fellow-travelers, . . . those semi-proletarian and semi-philistine intelligentsia creatures.”³⁶ In the realm of the Marxist dialectic, every negative development (such as the intelligentsia’s betrayal of the proletariat) had a positive corollary. The same process that thrust some of the intelligentsia into the arms of the bourgeoisie, Lenin argued, drove workers into the proletarianizing Party: “The elements of the intelligentsia closest to the proletariat remained loyal to the Russian Social Democratic Party, now headed by an intelligentsia drawn from



   “             ”:                      

the leadership of the working class itself.”³⁷ The Party became a crucible where workers and intelligentsia merged, producing the “workers’ intelligentsia” (rabochaiia intelligentsiia), a hybrid born from the “intersection of two historical paths: the class movement of the proletariat and the democratic movement of the intelligentsia drawn from various ranks.”³⁸ A Social Democratic pamphlet from  celebrated the “bonding between the true intelligentsia and the working class.” Assuming this unification to be a long-settled matter in “more advanced” Western Europe, the pamphlet rejoiced that in Russia too “the gap between the intelligentsia and the people has been recently closed: there is no intelligentsia that strives forward without the people. The people, in turn, cease to fend off the intelligentsia.”³⁹ The invention of the term “workers’ intelligentsia” was symptomatic: emphasizing the integration of the two groups suggested the mediation to be achieved between the worker and his consciousness. To be mentioned in a favorable sense, “intelligentsia” had to now be modified by adjectives such as “revolutionary,” “socialist,” or “proletarian.” The variety of permutations possible using the terms “worker” and “intelligentsia” was enormous. The Social Democratic press celebrated the emergence of the proletarian “semi-intelligentsia” (poluintelligentsiia). Focusing on the “mind-broadening” experience of workers in the recently legalized trade unions and other proletarian organizations, the Mensheviks greeted with enthusiasm the “theoretically sound proletarian intelligentsia” and the “intelligent workers” (intelligentnye rabochie). Lunacharskii was no less enthusiastic about the “advanced workers” (peredovye rabochii) who enrolled as students in the Capri school, “our Bolshevized intelligentsia” (bol’shevistvuiushchaia intelligentsiia). As Ivanovich put it: “As cells of workers’ intelligentsia consolidate themselves in the workers’ movement, accidental social-tourists can no longer get on. . . . Open the way—a new intelligentsia is coming!” Different adjectives accorded different shades of meaning. Kleinbort, for example, had reservations regarding the “worker-intelligent” that was, in his mind, “prone to syndicalism.” According to his lexicon, “worker-Marxists” alone encapsulated the proper fusion of the working class with the intelligentsia consciousness.⁴⁰ An accomplished fact within the Party, the mediation between the proletariat and the intelligentsia had yet to be achieved outside it. Many unenlightened workers still remained alienated. Aksel’rod elaborated: “The present, intelligentsia-based composition of Social Democracy is transitional. To re

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

main true to our historical mission we must . . . take preliminary steps toward rebuilding our organizational edifice on wholly proletarian foundations . . . converting Russian Social Democracy from a Party in which the revolutionary intelligentsia influences the advanced elements of the proletariat into a proletarian Party proper.”⁴¹ Aksel’rod called upon the “worker-intelligentsia,” what he considered the “most advanced, ideologically conscious, and organized layers of the working class, to exercise a systematic influence upon the still backward working masses,” bringing them into the Party fold: “Our Party’s conscious collective work has to draw ever broader masses of the proletariat into a conscious and organized struggle for their class interests. . . . By engulfing the [old socialist intelligentsia] and merging with it the ‘workers’ intelligentsia’ can win in Russian Social Democracy a position that will finally render us ‘The Party of the Proletariat,’ fully in accord with the designation of Russian Social Democratic Party.” A truly comprehensive proletarian awakening would have brought an instantaneous emancipation. Much to Aksel’rod’s consternation, however, Russian society was not yet ready for such a climax; the synthesis of work and thought had to be conducted for a while longer on a smaller scale, strictly within the Party organization. No matter how much Aksel’rod wished for an independent proletariat, the Party intelligentsia was for now indispensable: “The political organization of workers I am envisaging can of course be brought into being only with the energetic influence and direct participation of Social Democrats (workers and intelligentsia) acting as a united nucleus . . . and inspiring the proletariat.”⁴² Painting with a wide brush, we may conclude that the Russian Marxists learned from the bittersweet experience of  that, although a segment of the proletariat had become politically conscious, the class as a whole still needed external guidance. That the political enlightenment of the workers was henceforth to be affected through the medium of the Party did not necessarily mean the abolition of the principle of political leadership. Instead, this meant only that the intelligentsia vanguard was swallowed up by the “Party” that had assumed its role as a harbinger of proletarian consciousness.

Lenin and the “Party Intelligentsia” The Marxists’ views on the intelligentsia have so far been collapsed into, essentially, a single voice. The divergences within the Marxist camp, however, should no longer be passed over in silence, particularly as the spectrum of 

   “             ”:                      

Marxist opinion after  became ever richer and more nuanced. One of the central issues that divided Russian Social Democracy at the time was the question of working-class autonomy vis-à-vis Lenin’s transfer of the intelligentsia’s traditional tutelage over the proletariat to the Party. Although much of the Bolshevik rhetoric amounted to criticism of “intelligentsia arrogance,” Lenin continued to reject workers’ pretensions to independence. Skeptical of the working class’s ability to become conscious “spontaneously [stikhiino],” he emphasized the ongoing importance of professional revolutionaries. Lenin was attacked by various proponents of the authentic proletarian action, who expressed discontent with what they perceived as the abrogation of the proletarian voice by the Bolshevik Party intelligentsia. Among Lenin’s critics were Potresov, a key theorist of the Menshevik camp; Bogdanov, a prominent thinker known for his clash with Lenin over the intellectual leadership of the Bolshevik camp; and Makhaev, the guru of Russian syndicalism. The crux of my argument here is that, unhappy as these rivals of Lenin may have been with his “authoritarianism,” none of them could dissent sharply with his position without transgressing the boundaries of the Marxist discourse. The Bolshevik/Menshevik divide over the role of the intelligentsia appears less distinct than is often thought. Blaming the Bolsheviks for staging an intelligentsia coup against the proletariat within the Party, the archMenshevik Potresov, for example, was hardly an enemy of intelligentsia messianism. Potresov simply believed he was articulating proletarian aspirations, in accord with the dictates of history, whereas Lenin was imposing an external agenda. Bogdanov, the founder of the Proletcult movement (notorious for its anti-intelligentsia stance) was no more likely to assert that the proletariat could reach class consciousness without intelligentsia enlightenment. Bogdanov merely disagreed with Lenin’s view of the sequence and timetable of actions to be carried out by the intelligentsia. And finally, Makhaev, who vehemently condemned the idea of providing the manual laborer with any outside help, found himself, a thinker, claiming to be the “real voice” of the proletariat. The underlining affinities between the various positions taken by the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and the syndicalists suggest that the traditional historiographical preoccupation with cleavages in the Social Democratic movement ignores the basic consensus that existed among its major theorists on the question of the intelligentsia’s eschatological tasks. Let us begin by examining more closely Lenin’s position on the intelli

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

gentsia. He did not exactly flatter the intelligentsia. Yet, although Lenin’s writings are replete with castigations of the intelligentsia, a more careful reading reveals that he targeted only that part of the intelligentsia that remained outside the “Party.”⁴³ Even a cursory examination of What Is to Be Done? () shows that, in Lenin’s view, the vehicle of universalist consciousness was “not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia.” To justify his reliance on the intelligentsia, Lenin drew on a pamphlet by Kautsky (published in Russian only in ), which mentioned “the intelligentsia’s wide spiritual horizons, its developed capacity for abstract thinking and its lack of general class interests—features that distinguish the intelligentsia from other classes.” The intelligentsia was the layer of society “best capable of escaping from the confines of estate and class. Ideologically removed from the interests of the moment and class egoism, it has at heart only the interests of society taken as a whole.”⁴⁴ The Communist Manifesto likewise acknowledged the role of the intelligentsia when it stated that Communists were “bourgeois ideologists, who had raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” Echoing these texts, Lenin wrote that “it was in the minds of individual members of the intelligentsia stratum that modern socialism originated and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduced it into the proletarian class struggle.” From here Lenin drew his famous conclusion: “Socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without, and not something that arose within it spontaneously.”⁴⁵ Lenin qualified this statement, explaining that he did not discount the possibility of workers’ contribution to socialist theory. Yet workers “can do so not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, . . . when they are able, and to the extent that they are able to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge.” In a nutshell: “An advanced worker is a workerphilosopher.” Lenin, of course, believed that factory work created the necessary conditions for the development of proletarian consciousness and that the proletariat was the privileged historical subject (“the factory worker is none other than the foremost representative of the entire exploited population,” he wrote) and, finally, that the “large-scale exploitation of the factory proletariat cannot fail to lead the worker to see that he is oppressed by capital, that his struggle must be waged against the bourgeois class.”⁴⁶ Yet the crux of Lenin’s argument was that the proletarian, immersed in the routine 

   “             ”:                      

of labor, could not perceive reality in its totality. Left to his own devices, the worker was disposed to think only of the betterment of his own economic position. By arguing that, without the guidance of the intelligentsia, workers could go no further than a trade-unionist consciousness, Lenin in fact replicated a position we have come to see as fundamental to Marxist eschatology, whereby a worker who faced capitalism unaided became obtuse, passive, unable to respond to his messianic calling. Someone had to make the worker “understand his position . . . in order that he may fulfill his function.” And who was to take on this task but the “scientifically thinking intelligentsia,” the “revolutionary germ” that could “acquire and transmit to us political knowledge”? This train of thought led Lenin to the conclusion just mentioned, that “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without.”⁴⁷ Was Lenin a heretic because of his emphasis on politics over economics and his support of a top-down organizational approach? Should we be talking about “Lenin’s Russification and Orientalization of Marxism”?⁴⁸ Although Lenin’s conception of the concrete situation in Russia was certainly unique, my claim here is that it had nothing to do with a revision of the basic metahistorical principles of Marxism. Providing a new estimation of the distance Russia had to travel toward the Revolution, Lenin left intact the orthodox conception of the eschatological continuum toward Communism. Applying the Second International’s theory of imperialism in a concrete manner, Lenin reached the conclusion that the heart of the contradiction plaguing international capitalism was in “developing countries” such as Russia, where class tensions were greater than in the economically more advanced West.⁴⁹ Since in Lenin’s analysis a gulf emerged between the numerical size and the political importance of the Russian proletariat, a space was opened for what Laclau and Mouffe call a “transfer of the ontological privilege granted to the working class by Marxism from the working class as a social base of the movement to the working class as its political leader.” It was Lenin’s general premise as a Marxist that only one sector of society knew the structure of the underlying movement of History, and knew therefore the temporary character of the demands uniting the masses as a whole. Lenin’s conception of action was indebted to this interweaving of science and politics. The resulting transparency of the process of representation, according to Laclau and Mouffe, eliminated all problems with considering the Party intelligentsia as the spokesman of the Russian proletariat, laying the ground “for the relation of representation 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

to become the basic political mechanism . . . in the eschatological epic.” The scarce but politically radical Russian proletariat represented the teleology of Russian history; the Party intelligentsia, in turn, represented the teleology of the Russian proletariat. The peculiarities of Russian history inverted the sequence in which eschatological agencies appeared. However, the historical roles to be fulfilled remained the same.⁵⁰ The intellectual preconditions of Lenin’s “authoritarian turn,” Laclau and Mouffe summarize, were present from the moment in which “a limited actor—the working class—was raised to the status of ‘universal class.’ ” From this perspective, there was nothing necessarily Russian in Lenin’s Marxism. The sole reason that most of the theoreticians of the Second International did not advance in the authoritarian direction was because, for them, “the political centrality of the working class had to coincide with the proletarianization of the other social strata, and there was thus no room for the schism between class and the masses.”⁵¹ Lenin’s reliance on an outside agency to push the proletariat into the Revolution is often ascribed to his eagerness to create a conception of the historical process that was propelled by politics alone so that Russia (and Lenin himself ) could be elevated to the forefront of the world Revolution. I argue, however, that the so-called Leninist voluntarism is better explained within the broader search of many turn-of-the-century Marxist philosophers for an agent of freedom. By the s, Engels, accepted by all as the orthodox interpreter of Marxism at that time, came to identify society with nature, subsuming both realms of reality under a single set of laws. With human phenomena becoming integrated into a larger development of the universe, Marxist cosmology acquired a particular comprehensiveness. Within this worldview, human action was construed as an epiphenomenon of objective processes.⁵² A deterministic theory of history eliminated all traces of the free subjectivity, now regarded by Engels as “mere reflections of the evolution of the universe understood in terms of physics.”⁵³ The transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom became utterly problematic, repeating the failure of the mechanical world picture to explain what gives birth to freedom. Kautsky, for example, saw in the proletariat a “natural force.” Characterized not by free self-determination but by instinctual actions (Darwinian Marxism), the proletariat blindly followed its self-interest. In this scheme the victory of the proletariat was not an ethical but an economic necessity.⁵⁴ With the reduction of history to a chain of causal laws and the rigid separation between Marxist science and Marxist morality, the 

   “             ”:                      

antinomy between teleology and causality, ethics and science, “is” and “ought to be” are resurrected. How, within this scientific framework, could one preserve the teleological dimension of Marx’s notion of the Revolution in which human intervention inverts the natural order of causality?⁵⁵ Unless Marxist deterministic science was somehow combined with Marxist ethics, a complete forfeiture of the capacity for freedom and a transformation of the proletariat into an unthinking machine would be the likely conclusion of capitalist development. What Rosa Luxemburg called “Barbarism” was strongly reminiscent of a society populated by “proletarian automatons” and, particularly, of Lenin’s nightmare of workers whose horizons are constricted to trade-union consciousness. For Luxemburg, Communism was simply the best possible scenario of a human future for which Marxists must fight. A “leap to freedom” was needed, a sharp break with the deterministic course of history. The theoretical challenge of discovering an escape from the law of capitalism inclined Luxemburg to return to the “subjective factor” in the class struggle, without whose active intervention socialism remains only a possibility. Prefiguring many of Lenin’s arguments, Luxemburg stressed that the proletariat’s progress along the road to class consciousness could not be taken for granted but had to be paved by political struggle.⁵⁶ Russian Marxists were not oblivious to the difficulties facing their German colleagues. Plekhanov admitted that human consciousness established goals on which it acted, but he believed that these goals were “subjective illusions” fully explicable in terms of the objective order of nature. Returning to Spinoza, Plekhanov argued that true freedom lay not in positing goals but in recognizing a natural causal order. In this scheme, freedom was a cognition of necessity and Communism was a predetermined result of the development of capitalism.⁵⁷ Taking the opposite view, Tugan-Baranovskii maintained that the real contradiction of capitalism is moral and not economic. He went on to elaborate a systematic set of reasons explaining the impossibility of a purely economic collapse of capitalism, concluding that socialism can only be “the result of the conscious moral activity of men.”⁵⁸ In both cases, the task of articulating economic determinism with free agency remained incomplete. The philosophical crisis at the heart of Second International Marxism could be rephrased in eschatological terms: the gap between the empirical proletariat (the “is”) and the idea of the proletariat as it should be (the “ought to be”) assumed the scale of a cosmic tragedy, attesting to something like the Fall, subsequent to which human agency was 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

constrained by reality. For the discourse of ethics to have any relevance the subject had to be capable of free action, and for this the proletariat had to be reinvented. Dialectical reasoning had to be introduced to resolve the quandary Marxist analysis had reached. The solution Lenin proposed involved the professional revolutionaries. Injecting freedom into an automaton they brought about a radical interruption in a universe otherwise subjected to laws of causality. Herbert Marcuse points out that “the phrase ‘class consciousness from without’ did not originate with the Russian situation but was coined by Kautsky in his polemics against the draft of the new program of the Austrian Social Democratic Party.” Lenin, Marcuse concludes, “aimed beyond the exigencies of the specifically Russian situation, at a general international development of Marxism.”⁵⁹ From this perspective it is easy to appreciate why Lenin and so many of his peers insisted on Revolution—a qualitative change rather than a quantitative development, the so-called leap into freedom—rather than evolution as the high road to emancipation. All this bears directly on Lenin’s concept of political action. Far from being a sui generis voluntarist among Marxists, Lenin faced the same problem that beset his German and Russian peers in the Social Democratic movement, namely how to reconcile the conception of the historical proletariat as the dehumanized product of capitalism with the conception of the proletariat as the prototype of free humanity. His emphasis on professional revolutionaries resulted from the need to construe the Party as a source of freedom. Party members were elitists in Lenin’s conception because they had to be epistemologically privileged—their consciousness ensured salvation. Unaffected by the social structure, professional revolutionaries—akin to gnostic prophets who came from the outside and set out to deliver humanity from its bondage to the law of the universe— alone had the capacity to generate an autonomous action that would alter it.

The Menshevik Challenge The Marxist law of historical development postulated a progressive proletarianization of the Party. The Mensheviks believed that the revolutionary vanguard would become more and more proletarian in terms of its social composition. This was natural: increasingly politicized by the events around them, workers were supposedly inexorably drawn into the Party. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, proceeded from the proletarian character of Party ideology and 

   “             ”:                      

regarded every Party member as, so to speak, a spiritual proletarian, no matter what his social origins. Lenin stated that “consciousness of the historical task unites all members of our organization.”⁶⁰ This difference in emphasis inspired the debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: the former preferred to consider the Party as conscious as possible, the latter to consider it as proletarian as possible. The Menshevik Aksel’rod thought that Lenin’s Party structure would reduce workers to bourgeois servitors, all the while making them believe that they were serving their own interests. His mind boggled at the following scenario: Let us imagine: On the one hand, we have all the radical elements of the intelligentsia arrayed under the banner of Social-Democracy . . . supplying it with constantly growing contingents of professional revolutionaries who alone can belong to these organizations. On the other hand, we have the working masses that follow directives and are ready to obey. . . . What would that mean? . . . That a revolutionary political organization of the democratic bourgeoisie is leading the working masses in Russia who serve as its cannon fodder.

The old Menshevik, Solomon Schwartz, claimed that the Bolsheviks equated “revolutionary Social Democracy” with “intelligentsia” and assumed that “this is as it should be,” whereas the Mensheviks put up with the preponderance of the intelligentsia among Party workers as a “temporary evil” and tried to palliate this preponderance “by seizing every opportunity to stimulate rapprochement between the local Party organs and the masses.”⁶¹ Impressed with this analysis, many historians argued that the Menshevik strand in Russian Social Democracy stood for democratic, pluralist, and European Marxism, a far cry from the Bolshevik Asiatic tyranny. Indeed, according to Leonard Schapiro, “the Bolshevik temperament was closer to the traditional Russian conspiratorial revolutionary movement, while the Mensheviks looked more to the model of Western Europe.” The sectarianism and elitism of Lenin’s guidelines for Party organization reportedly led the Mensheviks to split with the Bolsheviks in .⁶² Focusing on the writings of the Mensheviks who engaged Lenin directly on the issue of the Party intelligentsia in the first decade of the twentieth century, I hope to reassess the validity of this interpretation. In viewing the birth of Social Democracy as a major break in the relationship between the intelligentsia and the proletariat, the Menshevik Alexandr Potresov explained 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

that the foundational Party congress of  meant that “the self-consciousness of the intelligentsia had come to assume a Party-minded shape.” Since the Party solemnly declared itself to be the organization of the proletariat, the intelligentsia must have joined forces with the popular movement: “The Populist terrorist groups, isolated from the masses, were replaced by an allRussian apparatus for the guidance of the masses. The intelligentsia erected its collective ‘I’ on the pedestal carved out of the proletarian movement!” Much to Potresov’s chagrin, however, the Bolsheviks took control of the Party, which soon lost its links with the proletariat, evolving into a Neo-Populist elitist “organization of the intelligentsia. In  the preponderance of the intelligentsia in Social Democracy was considered a heresy, although a conscious proletarian was even harder to find then than now [after ]. But if the Party is rid of everything foreign, contaminated and dubious and the remainder is examined it will prove to consist of the same old intelligentsia.” Potresov clearly deployed the term “intelligentsia” pejoratively, contrasting the authentic Menshevik proletariat with the elitist Bolshevik intelligentsia. He believed that Lenin’s authoritarianism proved that the foundation of a Social Democratic party in Russia had been premature and that Russia was hopelessly backward after all. Only in an advanced country could the proletariat and the intelligentsia achieve consciousness and fuse, in Potresov’s terms, into the “ideal mass” (ideal’naia massa): the mass that represents the final goal and the sum total of the interests of the movement. . . . For a while, at the height of the  revolution, the masses were what they should have been, the alpha and omega of our intelligentsia, guiding the entirety of its theoretical thinking. But once the mass ideal gave way to the actual masses [real’naia massa], formed ad hoc and organically lacking in consciousness, the intelligentsia regressed.

With no sense of direction, the Party was led astray by immature self-seekers. It is easy to recognize in Potresov’s analysis the Marxist distinction between “class in-itself,” the bearer of history who does not yet know itself, and “class for-itself,” the “ideal mass” whose appearance was momentary. The fact that the  rebellion was “spontaneous,” unmediated by working-class consciousness, explained to Potresov the intelligentsia’s failure to recognize its dependence on the proletariat and its descent back into Populist voluntarism.⁶³ The target of this critique was obviously Lenin. Lightly disguised as a member of the “omnipotent intelligentsia,” the Bolshevik leader was sup

   “             ”:                      

posedly unaware that his Blanquism was a theoretical corollary of the extremism typical of the backward Russian masses. Potresov saw Lenin’s entire theory of the Party as an “expression of the fact that the self-determination of the intelligentsia was unconscious” and implied that the Bolshevik predilection for a tightly knit group of independent revolutionaries was characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia’s detachment from the realities of the class struggle: “Perceived as a working-class leader, Lenin is in reality a paragon of kruzhkovshchina forced into the frame of Marxism.”⁶⁴ In this analysis, Lenin “makes the proletariat into an object, [not a subject] of the revolutionary movement.” Lenin’s kruzhkovshchina—the intelligentsia’s predilection to shut itself up in intellectual circles detached from outside reality—had led types like Lenin “to believe that subjective loyalty to the proletariat, coupled with the readiness to become a professional revolutionary, would transform the intelligentsia into the Subject of the Revolution.” Potresov went on to claim that “it is easy to substitute one class for another with a stroke of the pen. If it was possible in the past to elide all trace of the intelligentsia by putting a peasant and an artisan in the place of the workers, it is even easier now to pretend that the social democratic intelligentsia equals a proletarian party.”⁶⁵ Convinced that no mere manipulation of the name of the Party could bring about a real change in its essence, Potresov viewed the substitution of the proletariat by a proletariat-minded intelligentsia as Bolshevik hocus-pocus, a scheme that could not be realized. Since Lenin charged the Mensheviks with being “the conceited leaders of intellectual coteries,”⁶⁶ Potresov’s identification of the Bolsheviks as “intelligentsia” stabbed the Bolsheviks with their own dagger. Remaining apart from the working class (the ultimate slur for anyone who made himself out to be a Marxist), Lenin had ostensibly failed to efface his own intelligentsia self. Worse, Lenin’s rhetoric implied that the immature Russian workers shaped Bolshevik consciousness. By contrast, Potresov believed that their own position was modeled after the “ideal working class.” It seems that the recriminations flung back and forth between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had little to do with concrete workers. The conduct of the Russian working class in  was examined by both sides, to learn not what workers actually wanted but how their desires compared with Marx’s proletarian blueprint. The discrepancy between the Russian worker as he was and as he was ideally to become was a generally accepted indication of the road Russia had yet to travel before emancipation could become reality. The core of Potresov’s argument was that an “unconscious proletariat” 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

breeds a “megalomaniac intelligentsia.” The Bolshevik victory at the Second Party Congress was the fruit of an unfortunate collusion between the “awakening masses” and the intelligentsia’s collective mind. Having alienated itself from reality, the Leninist intelligentsia became “rationalist”—a pejorative that Potresov used to imply a contamination by scholastic ideals. Worlds away from the Menshevik materialism, Lenin’s political program was a misbegotten set of voluntarist and idealist notions representing, not the proletariat, but the alienated Bolshevik consciousness. Potresov explained the origins of the Leninist deviation by means of hyperbole: certain social determinations had the quality of eliding their traces and making the agent believe his actions were undetermined; thus the backward Russian masses produced an elitist pseudo-intelligentsia that fancied itself free and independent of reality. The central questions for Potresov were, “Where are the guarantees that the machinations of the Party intelligentsia are not aimed at satisfying its own interests but truly correspond to the interests of the workers movement in general? Are they to be found only in declarations of subjective loyalty to the revolutionary teaching of Marx?” Guarantees of the “congruence of intelligentsia intentions and actions with the proletarian movement taken in toto” were a prerequisite to the assumption, made by the Russian Marxists, of the “role played in the West by the Social Democratic workers’ parties as the leading detachment of the proletariat.”⁶⁷ Was the Russian intelligentsia, as exemplified by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, adequate to the task? “Compelled to examine the attitudes with which the revolutionary Russian intelligentsia arrived at the forefront of Russian Social Democracy,” Potresov sketched two diametrically opposed possibilities: “Either the psychology of the intelligentsia is congruous with the content of the proletarian movement, in which case intelligence should not be feared [here Potresov obviously had the Menshevik intelligentsia in mind] or the congruity we search for is absent, in which case all our efforts are for naught.” Under the latter scenario, the Bolshevik “intelligentsia’s element, unrestrained by the proletarian consciousness, would carve out its own historical path.” Lenin, that “super-man and self-generating dictator . . . who put himself in command of the laws awakening proletarian consciousness” was, in Potresov’s eyes, the paragon of the disastrous intelligentsia-proletariat mismatch that prevailed in Russia. Potresov’s collaborator, Dan, reached an identical conclusion. “We suffer from intelligentsia deviation,” Dan wrote. “The tone in our Party is set by revolutionaries who act out their own psychology and not the psychology of the masses.” Finally, there was the Menshevik Plekhanov 

   “             ”:                      

who made a similar pronouncement: “Had Marx been alive he would have denounced Lenin, as he denounced all other social utopians . . . who believed the mass was merely a raw material [that] the intelligentsia, blessed as it is by the holy spirit, acts upon. I did not hide from Lenin my view that in his conception consciousness emerged, . . . as Hegel put it, ‘wie aus der Pistole geshossen’ [as if shot out of a pistol].” ⁶⁸ Scathing criticism of Bolshevism notwithstanding, the Menshevik road to Revolution also included a stage during which the intelligentsia guided the working class. Limiting the role of the intelligentsia to, as Martov put it, “a modest germ whose agitation and propaganda serve as the spark which kindles the fire that is to turn into a proletarian blaze,” the Mensheviks hardly broke the spell of intelligentsia elitism. No less deferential toward the “proletariat’s initiative” than Potresov, Martov leveled harsh accusations against Lenin’s top-down organizational approach, impressing upon his readers that the Party should not assume the task of rescuing the workers and so “setting the sea on fire. . . . Even though the proletariat may still be unaware of the importance of its actions, the road to salvation lies through the workers’ own flesh and blood struggle.” Martov’s rhetoric was perhaps more deferential toward the proletariat than Lenin’s, but his desire to make the workers “aware” of the road they should take reintroduced through the back door the notion of the intelligentsia’s epistemological superiority. Aksel’rod’s contention that “the intelligentsia must imbue the workers with Social Democratic principles” rings Leninist as well.⁶⁹ A final anecdote will do: after the failure of , voices in the Social Democratic camp called for a non-Party all-Russian congress composed of representatives of the entire working class and not just its conscious stratum. While Martov and Aksel’rod supported this measure at the Fifth Party Congress (), Aksel’rod intended to invite to the congress only “advanced workers” and expected the Party intelligentsia to organize the congress.⁷⁰ Clearly, the Mensheviks maintained it was the Party’s drive to express the historical goals of the ideal proletariat rather than to give voice to the concrete demands of Russian workers that were supposed to make the Party “proletarian.” The following soliloquy by Martov leaves no doubts in this regard: Can we draw the conclusion that our Party is proletarian from the fact that the object of our work is the proletariat? Do not other parties, in essence hostile toward the proletariat, take the proletariat as their object as well?



The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion And if so, what then distinguishes Social Democracy from other parties that work with workers? What makes our party truly proletarian is that our work renders the proletariat at once the object and the subject of the movement. . . . Merging with the proletariat, Social Democracy wants to develop conscious and independent-minded cadres of workers, giving them the opportunity to take their fate into their own hands.⁷¹

It seems obvious that Martov did not have a utilitarian interest in “working with the proletariat.” The Mensheviks were supposed to “develop” workers’ consciousness and then dissolve themselves within the class-messiah. But in so far as they clung to the classic Marxist myth of the enlightenment of the proletariat by a conscious agency they did not diverge much from Bolshevism. An in-depth study of the Menshevik-Bolshevik controversy over the organizational structure of the Party is beyond the scope of the present project, but it is worth noting that the eschatological framework within which the debate was set does not allow for a strict dichotomy between the inclusivist Menshevik democrats who wished to see as many workers as possible in the Party and the fanatical Bolshevik purists who would accept as full Party members only conscious revolutionaries. The contested question was not the abstract, theoretical issue of whether the agent of salvation was the proletariat or the intelligentsia—in fact, both sides subscribed to the theory of the split messiah—but the practical issue of whether Russia, concretely, was close to or remote from Revolution. The Russian Social Democratic Party, the Mensheviks claimed, should not be too discriminating in enrollment because conditions were not yet ripe for the Party to function as a strictly “proletarian” agency. Only once the class struggle in Russia had gradually forged the pauperized toilers and the petit bourgeois intellectuals into a single, pure proletariat would the need to defend the purity of the proletarian message demand a purely proletarian Party. Failing to realize that the bi-polar capitalist class society in Russia was still remote in time, Lenin, in the Menshevik view, had prematurely posed the issue of Party purity. The Bolsheviks sharply disagreed. Lenin’s theory that Russia was the weakest link in the global chain of capitalism convinced the Bolsheviks that Russia could witness one of the first proletarian revolutions. To be sure, Lenin did not see many indications that a capitalist society was developing in early twentieth-century Russia. But he derided the Mensheviks who, focusing exclusively on the forthcoming war between the proletariat and the bour-



   “             ”:                      

geoisie, waited for a “pure socialist revolution.” Lenin warned: “Such a moment will never happen!” Middle classes—the petit-bourgeoisie and the peasantry—were not likely to disappear in the near future. Nevertheless—and it was here that Lenin’s analysis was unique—proletarian seizure of power was possible in Russia because the prerequisites for an advanced revolutionary consciousness among the native working class were already in place. Because of Russia’s position in the international division of labor and the division of labor’s distorting effect on the development of class struggle in the country, the native working class developed, according to Lenin, into a revolutionary vanguard without the parallel development of the native bourgeoisie. Given this assumption, the Mensheviks should not have been surprised that Lenin had turned, in Potresov’s words, into a “monomaniac who wanted to purge Russian Social Democracy of all polluting spirits—purgare et clistirizzare [purge and evacuate].” If the Revolution was within reach, the task of the Party was to purify itself and make preparations to engage the forces of darkness in the final showdown.⁷² The implication here is not that the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were indistinguishable. Although they shared a common historical understanding, disputants within Social Democracy deligitimized each other by attributing to each other a “false appraisal of the current moment” (lozhnoe ponimanie momenta).⁷³ Needless to say, these disagreements had profound implications in terms of revolutionary tactics. My point is this: clashing over how ready various eschatological agents were to assume their historical roles, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks left unquestioned the view of history as a long journey toward the merger of the intelligentsia with the proletariat.

The Bogdanovist Critique A variety of scholars have studied the Lenin-Bogdanov controversy with the goal of showing that an alternative to Lenin’s intelligentsia authoritarianism existed not only in Menshevism but within Bolshevism itself. Aleksandr Bogdanov has been identified with the notion of the workers’ capacity for authentic self-expression, and with the perspicacious critique of Lenin’s concept of the Revolution as a seizure of power by the intelligentsia speaking in the name of the working class. Had Bogdanov been heeded, so the argument goes, proletarian emancipation would have been brought within reach, and the substitution of the tyranny of the Bolshevik Party intelligentsia for the 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

tyranny of tsarist bureaucracy would have been averted. But how could Bogdanov, a self-professed orthodox Marxist, break away from the eschatological structure of the revolutionary discourse by denying the need for an external agency pushing the proletariat to self-awareness? The precise nature of Bogdanov’s criticism of Lenin deserves closer scrutiny.⁷⁴ Bogdanov is known as one of the leaders of Forward (Vpered), a secessionist faction which encompassed those Bolsheviks who, according to some historians, had become dissatisfied with Lenin’s reliance on the intelligentsia. Indeed, Bogdanov published prolifically on the subject of the intelligentsia. Carefully distinguishing between “groups” (based on specialization) and “classes” (based on conflict and domination), he tended to associate the intelligentsia with the former category.⁷⁵ In Bogdanov’s view, as long as the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat were still somewhat fused—which was, by and large, the case in the backward tsarist empire—one could identify a number of “intermediary groupings” (promezhutochnye gruppirovki), the intelligentsia being perhaps the most important among them.⁷⁶ Generally speaking, Bogdanov accepted Lenin’s and Martov’s estimation that after the revolution of  the intelligentsia became the brain behind Russian capitalism, thus transforming itself into a class ally of the bourgeoisie.⁷⁷ In his view, the Party intelligentsia was characterized by “a built-in instability (neustoichivost’ ), lack of discipline (nevyderzhanost’ ) and a weakness of purpose—features that reflect the intelligentsia’s subordinate role in the organization of production.”⁷⁸ Hence its tendency toward vanity and self-aggrandizement. Apparently for these reasons, Bogdanov took Lenin to task for what he maintained was the latter’s excessive reliance on intelligentsia leadership: “It would be very strange to insist that the theory of historical materialism had sprung from the experiences of the intelligentsia,” he wrote. “Marxist analysis emphasizes productive forces and labor power, things the intelligentsia knows least. The sphere of manual labor remains almost completely alien to the majority of intelligentsia ideologists who revolve primarily within the sphere of ‘spiritual’ labor.”⁷⁹ Lenin’s scientific intelligentsia, in this analysis, could not execute universalist tasks because it lacked the inspiration of collectivist labor. The revolutionary challenge could not be met “without the direct participation of working-class representatives.” Bogdanov leaned toward a negative appraisal of the new stratum of the Russian intelligentsia, “the liberal professionals and administrative factory personnel” torn between the bourgeoisie and the 

   “             ”:                      

proletariat and incapable of class organization.⁸⁰ At one point he exclaimed: “I cannot see how the intelligentsia, its members laboring individually, could . . . choke individualism and elevate humanity to its next, collectivist stage.” In contrast to the activity of the intelligentsia, Bogdanov argued, the activity of the proletariat unfolded in a nexus of economic relations. “It is the proletarian, not the member of the intelligentsia, who becomes aware of a discrepancy between the point of view of the producer and the point of view of the employer. It is the proletarian again who feels most acutely the subordination of ideas to economic interests and relations; the intelligentsia is actually inclined in the opposite direction, toward impractical daydreaming.” It followed from this analysis that only “proletarian culture” (proletarskaia kul’tura)—a Bogdanovist term that comes very close to what we have seen “proletarian consciousness” to mean—could renew the link between knowledge and labor. To become class conscious “the workers had to absorb their labor experience fully.” No amount of scientific or philosophical insight provided by the intelligentsia could substitute for proletarian class experience.⁸¹ What distinguished Bogdanov’s class analysis was his position that class struggle was, first and foremost, a struggle for control over knowledge: Economic necessity forces capitalism to provide the proletariat with enough knowledge to master the techniques of production. In the long run, the proletariat adds up what it learns and forms a global comprehension of its historical mission gradually turning capitalist knowledge into a weapon against capitalism. . . . The demands of the production process itself, if nothing else, enhances workers’ consciousness.⁸²

This is not to say that Bogdanov claimed for a moment that workers attained class consciousness automatically.⁸³ For Netti, the hero of Bogdanov’s futuristic novel, The Engineer Meni, it is clear that workers can well be lacking in consciousness. Such workers were not worthy of the name. “A worker does not deserve to belong to the working class if he is not conscious of his worker essence, his intimate link with other workers and his place in the system of labor and in society. . . . That worker who preferred to live by himself, as a pseudo-solitary, pseudo-independent entity was not a worker at all.”⁸⁴ Since retrograde factory workers could fall outside of the proletarian sphere, it was the role of the “theorist,” wrote Bogdanov, “to organize proletarian material—a distinguished and honorable role comparable to that of the welder of mechanical parts in a machine shop. It took Marx’s Capital to 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

organize the lives of millions of workers by welding their vital interests and cherished aspirations into one whole.”⁸⁵ Much like his peers in the Social Democratic movement, Bogdanov maintained that the socialist intelligentsia—depicted by him, as by so many other Marxists, as the “white crows” (belye vorony) of the intelligentsia—remained an important help to the proletariat. In fact, Bogdanov regarded his empiricocriticism as a philosophical expression of the socialist intelligentsia’s world view. It was a stratum with which he clearly identified.⁸⁶ The socialist intelligentsia was invested in Bogdanov’s writings with the responsibility of “completing the education of the worker.” It was “vital” that it imparted to the workers a “complete socialist education,” thereby preparing them to be “conscious leaders in the proletarian battles ahead.”⁸⁷ All this suggests it will not be difficult to find the Janus-faced New Man in Bogdanov’s writings. Indeed, moving beyond the claim that with the advent of socialism “it will be impossible to speak of class divisions,”⁸⁸ Bogdanov insisted that the most important feature of full proletarian consciousness was the final transcendence of the “authoritarian dualism of spirit and matter.” Here Bogdanov reiterated the familiar position that the intelligentsia, characterized by its exclusive ownership of “intellectual capital,” will eventually to be abolished as a separate entity.⁸⁹ This is the conceptual context which gave birth to Bogdanov’s theorizing on the “synthesis of human faculties in the New Man” (sobiranie cheloveka).⁹⁰ Bogdanov did not recognize a requisite correlation between class, understood in the sociological sense of the term, and consciousness. Just as workers could move into the camp of other classes, books written by Marx could “objectively” represent the working class. “Marx,” Bogdanov explained, “could have been a member of the bourgeois intelligentsia a thousand times over. Yet, if his ideas had been exclusively the product of the thought of the bourgeoisintelligentsia, his impact . . . would have been limited to the intelligentsia circles alone.”⁹¹ Indeed, the class origins of a thinker should not become a fetish: What does it matter whether the ideologist belongs to the group in whose name he speaks? Is it not ultimately the same no matter what temporary personal vessel contains the collective creative energy?! . . . The question is how fully and completely one expresses the proletarian perspective of the world. . . . Not a worker, Marx, for example, was able to assume a workers’ perspective by force of thought. . . . In the workers’ outlook the great scholar found the 

   “             ”:                       fulcrum for his thought, a point of view which allowed him to penetrate into the depth of reality and give birth to . . . proletarian self-consciousness.⁹²

This being said, Bogdanov preferred that “the main task of articulating the life experience of the working class and uniting its practice with its thought not to be done by the ‘varangians’ [that is, the bourgeois intelligentsia], but by the new, ‘workers’ intelligentsia,’ immersed in the proletarian milieu and imbued with the experiences of the working class” (though it should be noted that the adjective “workers” referred here not to the class origins of the “workers’ intelligentsia” but to its proletarian way of thinking).⁹³ When he defined the role of Social Democracy as the “creation of a consistent and systematic link between contemporary science and the collective labor experience of the working class,” Bogdanov was harking back to the Marxist notion of the decisive mediation between the messianic Subject’s brain and his heart.⁹⁴ He urged the intelligentsia to cling to its tradition of pedagogical authoritarianism toward the laboring classes because he recognized no other agency that could liberate the mind of the proletariat from the shackles of “bourgeois culture.”⁹⁵ Bogdanov was certain that the best elements amongst the workers knew very well that they still required intelligentsia guidance. “Social Democratic workers,” he wrote, “demand that the members of the intelligentsia who remained loyal to the movement continue with their propaganda effort, distributing literature and founding Party schools.” Nothing upset Bogdanov more than the fact that in  the Party intelligentsia had put out only “revolutionary democratic” propaganda leaving “the socialist principles of class consciousness relatively little propagated. . . . Not enough was done to create a powerful and influential nucleus of workers possessing complete and rounded socialist education.” The result of this tactical blindness was that Russian workers continued to lack the “intellectual discipline (distiplina uma) necessary if they were to shoulder weighty leadership responsibilities.”⁹⁶ One of Bogdanov’s principal conclusions from the first Russian revolution was that the Russian proletariat required propaganda of a “much higher type,” full and “more encyclopaedic.” This propaganda would instil a comprehensive class-based worldview in an “influential nucleus of workers.” To that end, the Party intelligentsia was supposed “to fill the inevitable gaps in workers’ knowledge . . . and to prepare them to be conscious leaders in revolutionary struggles the future will bring.”⁹⁷ Surprising as it may sound coming from an alleged supporter of proletar

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

ian cultural autonomy, Bogdanov regarded Russian workers inferior in many ways to the Marxist intelligentsia. The trouble with the native workers was, in his view, their lack of discipline which kept them from mastering the necessary revolutionary knowledge. Not that workers were intrinsically inferior, of course. “If one or another comrade-worker gained mastery over himself,” Bogdanov hastened to qualify, “then he should not be considered second to the intelligentsia; but if, as frequently happened, a worker suffered from dearth of discipline, then such a worker found it nearly impossible to cope with knowledge painstakingly acquired through reading and study.” Bereft of discipline of the mind, workers still had plenty to learn from the intelligentsia; their knowledge, unlike that of the intelligentsia, was not yet “methodically organized” or “encased in a system.”⁹⁸ Bogdanov was clearly in agreement with Lenin on the subject of the historical role of the Party intelligentsia. He accepted both the thesis that the liberal intelligentsia betrayed the working class and the thesis that the working class was not yet ready to assume responsibility for its own fate. What separated Bogdanov and Lenin was the former’s desire to overcome the split between the revolutionary intelligentsia and the working class as soon as possible, while Lenin considered the split unavoidable for the time being. Bogdanov demanded that “Bolshevism create a comprehensive proletarian culture, here and now, within the framework of the existing bourgeois society.”⁹⁹ Otherwise, he warned, the young and immature Russian proletariat might be culturally subjugated by a new intelligentsia stratum even if it emerges out of the Revolution victorious.¹⁰⁰ The formation of a workers’ intelligentsia was, according to Bogdanov, the order of the hour. Only after it appeared would genuine working-class consciousness emerge and the Revolution become imminent. Lenin, on the other hand, assumed that the divide between the proletariat and its consciousness would persist, at least until the Revolution. If, for Bogdanov, workers’ consciousness was the Revolution’s prerequisite, Lenin maintained that the Revolution would erupt spontaneously and workers’ consciousness would follow. Implicitly criticizing Bogdanov, Lenin claimed that the political education of workers “cannot be obtained by books alone”; it had to be instilled not in a classroom setting “but by the very progress of the Revolution,” on the barricades and the factory floor. “Experience in the struggle,” Lenin concluded, “enlightens more rapidly and more profoundly than years of propaganda.”¹⁰¹ The disagreement between the two Bolsheviks was revealed when they 

   “             ”:                      

considered capitalism’s effect on the working class. Claiming that capitalism gradually imbued the worker with a “collectivist consciousness,” Bogdanov aspired to gain time and worried that a premature Revolution would find workers’ minds unprepared for a new world, precipitating a return to the bondage of capitalism. Bogdanov maintained that acute crisis can liberate “new cultural forms” but not conjure them up out of nothing. “If a new ideology has not been born in the midst of the productive class beforehand it is not likely it will be created during the moment of the revolutionary break itself.”¹⁰² Lenin, on the other hand, thought that capitalism crippled the worker, strengthening his propensity to automatism. He therefore believed that events should be expedited and that the revolutionary process itself would provide workers with an all-enlightening cathartic experience. Lenin feared that Bogdanovist gradualist educational tactics would lead the proletariat away from its historical task, dissipating the Marxists’ revolutionary lore with mundane pedagogics. Whereas Lenin thought that a revolutionary situation emerged when the ruling class could no longer rule as before and the spontaneous insubordination of the working class surged, Bogdanov was of the opinion that a revolutionary situation came into being when an enlightened, progressive working class eclipsed the dark, repressive alliance of the Russian bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Lenin was a gnostic, believing that the Revolution would reverse the course of history. Hence the “love of dialectics” attributed to him. By contrast, Bogdanov was more of a gradualist, a proponent of incremental historical change. An alternative conceptualization of the revolutionary process emerges out of what, during the Soviet period, was described as Bogdanov’s more “mechanistic” worldview. “Ideology” and “proletarian culture” appear in his writings as elastic concepts that spanned the period before and after the seizure of power, turning the Revolution from a single dramatic event into a process “involving multilayered transformation, including, in particular, culture building.”¹⁰³ Taken to its logical conclusion, Bogdanov’s view of the Revolution suggested that it was not enough to have a well-disciplined and well-organized “Party.” At times Bogdanov was even close to proposing that the Party be considered a means, not an end. “For the conscious political activist,” he wrote, “the power of his party is . . . by no means a final end. If need be, he can forget about the [subordinate] end for the sake of the [final goal].”¹⁰⁴ Additional agencies were needed to bring enlightenment to the workers. This 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

explains the genesis of Bogdanov’s idea of the “proletarian university”— what turned out to be the forerunner of the Soviet educational system with its strong orientation toward recruitment of students from the working class (see chapter ). Convinced that workers had to be educated in order to make a real Revolution possible, Bogdanov urged the emigre Party branches to organize Marxist universities for proletarians. (Two such schools were formed under his auspices in Capri and Bologna.) In Bogdanov’s scheme, these bodies were to disseminate the “socialist principles of class consciousness” and inculcate the working class with the “socialist worldview.” In the “proletarian universities” the intelligentsia was to assist workers to “systematize” their knowledge, thereby reaching a level of development where they can assume the leadership role in the movement “they ought to assume.”¹⁰⁵ But in the pre-revolutionary years Bogdanov had no choice but to concede to Lenin that, as long as the “new layer of organizers from proletarian backgrounds had not yet been created, no one could take the tasks of class-cultural development out of the hands of the alien intelligentsia.” Granting that much, Bogdanov still wanted the intelligentsia’s proselytizing to emphasize cultural rather than political questions. The immediate goal was to foster workers’ consciousness, not workers’ revolutionary zeal, for unless enlightenment preceded the Revolution the latter might be stillborn.¹⁰⁶ Lenin and Bogdanov clashed over what had to happen first: consciousness or Revolution. Lenin contended that the Party intelligentsia had to articulate the universalist message, which would be embraced by the workers once the objective revolutionary situation had expanded their horizons. Bogdanov, on the other hand, believed the proletariat had to absorb what the intelligentsia could offer before the Revolution, for only if the workers were in a position to understand what they were doing would the Revolution be possible and worthwhile. Neither side, however, maintained that workers’ consciousness combusted spontaneously. Lenin and Bogdanov both viewed the class struggle as a contest for consciousness rather than a scramble for power. For both men, the eschatological quest to unite the proletariat with its universalist essence remained the key to emancipation.¹⁰⁷

The Syndicalist and Neo-Populist Objections Bogdanov’s warning about the Party’s overdependence on the intelligentsia was taken to heart by the syndicalists, who denounced at the outset any tute

   “             ”:                      

lage of the proletariat.¹⁰⁸ A leading theoretician of Anarcho-Syndicalism, Novomirskii, wrote in  that the Social Democratic ideology “is not the expression of the interests of the working class, but of the declassed intelligentsia—the new deceivers of the people. Workers, not socialist intellectuals, must carry out the central task of the Revolution!”¹⁰⁹ The syndicalist’s venomous attack on the claim of Social Democracy to represent the working class blossomed into a wholesale condemnation of any organizational structure whatsoever, a move that naturally enraged not only the hard-core Leninists but the entire Marxist camp. The syndicalist Makhaev (the name given in Russian to Jan Waclaw Machajski) was best known for his anti-intelligentsia stance. According to the account of Albert Parry, Makhaev’s work aroused the “fierce opposition” of virtually all revolutionary intellectuals of the time. “They at once mobilized the entire corps of their theoretical publicists, orators, and agitators. The whole propaganda apparatus of the Socialist movement, be it Bolshevik, Menshevik or Socialist-Revolutionary, went into action against this new common enemy. The virulence of their attack was unprecedented.”¹¹⁰ Makhaev’s views gave rise to the expression “Makhaevshchina”—a pejorative term that came to denote intelligentsia-baiting in Social Democratic parlance. In June  Makhaev was to describe the Bolshevik seizure of power as a “counterrevolution of the intelligentsia,” echoing an anarcho-syndicalist critique from the same year that had accused the Bolsheviks of substituting private capitalism with state capitalism and of bringing a new ruling class to the helm, “a class born from the womb of the intelligentsia.”¹¹¹ Makhaev and his prolific popularizer, Evgenii Lozinskii, held the view that the real class division lay not between the workers and the capitalist but between the manual and the mental laborers, and this view merits special attention because it was revived by the syndicalist movement both inside and outside the Soviet Union after  (see chapter ).¹¹² The syndicalist contention that the Leninist Party was doomed to evolve into a “conspiracy of intellectuals” became one of the most important ultraleftist explanations for why the revolution failed. An authentic workers’ revolution, according to the views held in these quarters, had to topple not only “property owners” but also the far more insidious “knowledge owners.”¹¹³ Having demonstrated to his satisfaction that the proletariat and the intelligentsia had divergent and ultimately opposed class interests, Makhaev saw no reason that workers should cooperate with their self-styled tutors.¹¹⁴ 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

“The intelligentsia, not unlike the bourgeoisie, is a class of exploiters. The only difference between the two bloodsuckers who feed on the proletarian body resides in their respective sources of power over the laborer: whereas the bourgeoisie possesses the means of production, the intelligentsia has a monopoly over knowledge.” According to Makhaev, in the hands of the intelligentsia knowledge became “a hereditary possession sustained through control over access to education.”¹¹⁵ Moreover, the intelligentsia was in a sense more dangerous than the bourgeoisie since it was able to deceive the workers into believing that they could not make a step without it. Lozinskii elaborated: Crediting itself with creating the real science that shows the proletariat the way to paradise on earth, the intelligentsia has persuaded the proletariat to believe that without the guidance of the intelligentsia the proletariat is helpless. Marx, Engels and Lasalle, the holy trinity, laid the foundations for the “science” and the philosophy of socialism. But in fact the Socialist-Marxist theories are a Trojan horse within the proletarian movement. The Marxist intelligentsia critiques the bourgeoisie only in order to achieve its own class aims.¹¹⁶

Whereas the proletariat strove to nationalize and expropriate the means of production, “the intelligentsia was interested only in the former—nationalization of the means of production which will dispossess but not expropriate the bourgeoisie.” According to the Makhaevists, such a truncated revolution was designed to allow the intelligentsia to control the economy under the pretext of managing the state. “The intelligentsia connived to use the power of the proletariat to destroy the bourgeoisie. Its alliance with the proletariat was a purely tactical step and had nothing to do with martyrdom for the sake of proletarian emancipation.”¹¹⁷ Lozinskii insisted that the intelligentsia’s pompous claims to scientific leadership tumbled like a house of cards before the proletarian request that its tutor “coldly apply its sociological method to itself.” Cold reflection supposedly revealed that the intelligentsia, busy with class analysis of everything and everybody, shunned self-examination. What were the interests of the intelligentsia? Lozinskii implied that nobody in the Social Democratic movement dared ask that obvious question, fearing self-incrimination. “According to Kautsky, the intelligentsia is a ‘class,’ albeit one without ‘class interests.’ How could this be?!” Lozinskii wondered aloud: “Was not economic inter

   “             ”:                      

est the basis for the notion of class?” The contention that the intelligentsia was not particularist, that “its consciousness had nothing to do with class identity” (ne klassovo-samosoznatel’naia) baffled Lozinskii even more, since this contention contradicted Kautsky’s own belief that “the intelligentsia was a wise and well-educated class.” At this point Lozinskii launched his final attack: “Why should the proletariat believe in the theory of ‘intelligentsia socialism’? If Kautsky argued that theory was always embedded in society what then about his own theory? Had he somehow miraculously elevated himself above society?” The Makhaevists “unmasked” the Marxist intelligentsia by redirecting its scientific weapons against itself. Having denounced the intelligentsia for unveiling opposing class interests only in order to conceal its own agenda, they claimed that they had proven that the Social Democratic intelligentsia was tossing bourgeois sand in the eyes of the proletariat. In this analysis, the Marxist doctrine of proletarian class consciousness was a travesty. Lozinskii stated: “That worker who credulously follows Party banners is not a conscious worker but one that is best deceived.” The so-called Social Democratic, proletarian consciousness was in actuality an “intelligentsia consciousness” that had nothing to do with the self-expression of the authentic proletariat. Proletarians who joined Social Democracy, the Makhaevists concluded, were deluded by the Marxist intelligentsia into digging their own graves.¹¹⁸ The Neo-Populist thinker and the prophet of the “Spiritual Revolution,” Ivanov-Razumnik, dedicated his What Is Makhaevshchina? () to an indepth discussion of Makhaev’s aspiration to be a rigorous materialist social scientist and to identify the intelligentsia strictly in terms of its economic position. Questioning the validity of the nonethical appraisal of the role of the intelligentsia in history, Ivanov-Razumnik maintained that socioeconomic reductionism had immersed both the Marxists and the Makhaevists in an intellectual morass: “It is important to investigate the crude theory of Makhaev to understand the logical conclusions certain brands of socialism should reach,” he declared, having “scientific socialism” in mind. IvanovRazumnik opened with a salute to Makhaev: “Insofar as it represents the logical outcome of the unwillingness to distinguish the ethical and the socioeconomic components in the term ‘intelligentsia,’ Makhaevshchina is a brilliant reductio ad absurdum of the key tenets of mainstream Marxism. The avenging angel of Makhaevshchina exposed the perennial sin of Orthodox Marxism.”¹¹⁹ 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

As a rhetorical ploy, Ivanov-Razumnik embraced for a moment the Makhaevist argument that the error of Marxism consisted in “attempting to recognize the intelligentsia as a class, at the same time tying this recognition to an immediate disassociation from that class,” which amounted to a wish to have your cake and eat it too. Ivanov-Razumnik credited Makhaev with forcing the Marxist interpretation of the intelligentsia into a dead end: Once the intelligentsia was construed as one class among many how could it also possess a universalist, supraclass perspective on history? “Makhaevshchina is a wonderful proof-disproof: it starts with the Marxist socioeconomic understanding of the intelligentsia and takes this line of thought to its limits— something the Marxists do not dare to do because they sense that they contradict themselves.” Having adopted the form of Makhaev’s argument (judge yourself by your own standard, as it were), Ivanov-Razumnik inverted its content to condemn both the Marxists and those who critique them from economist positions. The effort was to show that the Makhaevists undermined their own position even as they shattered that of the Marxists: “Having examined the topic with which the orthodox Marxists were so preoccupied—the class character of the intelligentsia—the Makhaevists arrived at an apparent absurdity.” According to Ivanov-Razumnik, “the Makhaevists had no choice but to take a neck-breaking leap”—to make the arbitrary move from a sociological to an ethical plane and refuse to apply their critique of the intelligentsia to themselves. “As soon as the discussion came to the Makhaevists themselves, they, like the Marxists, immediately passed from socioeconomic to socioethical grounds: the scene is suddenly full of such notions as the ‘disinterested service to truth and justice,’ and ‘overcoming of one’s class nature.’ ” Obsessed with showing that the intelligentsia could not prove good on its pretension to be the representative of the universalist idea, Makhaevists, in Ivanov-Razumnik’s argument, “failed to offer an explanation as to what was their own class epistemology and in what sense it is universally valid.” IvanovRazumnik cited Lozinskii with a sneer: “Only the intelligentsia that unveils the true face of its own class of mental laborers before the proletariat . . . by this very act proves its loyalty to the proletariat and shows that it renounces deception and lies.” While Lozinskii conceded that “such members of the intelligentsia are few,” he nevertheless insisted, clearly with himself in mind, that “they will be found.” At this point, Ivanov-Razumnik had good reason to pose a crucial ques

   “             ”:                      

tion: If the proletariat was no longer under the tutelage of the Marxist intelligentsia then was it not, in this scheme, under the tutelage of Lozinskii? And if so, what distinguished Makhaevists from other Marxist elitists? “Totally unaware of the implications of his argument Lozinskii contended that now that the true nature of the intelligentsia was revealed and its mask was torn off, the time has come to pass these revelations along to the international proletariat.” But it was easy to deduce from the grammatical construction of the sentence that the proletariat occupied a passive position, the active role of the “teacher of the proletariat” being left for the Makhaevists. “Lozinskii and the Makhaevists see themselves as ‘the true proletarian ideologists and the genuine representatives of the working masses.’ But then, if they are not drawn from the intelligentsia, who are they in class terms? Well, according to Lozinskii, they are . . . exceptions from the general rule!” At this point Ivanov-Razumnik begged Makhaevists “not to skip the place in their own book where they themselves are being discussed!” With heavy sarcasm he noted that “while ordinary Marxists think they are a simple ‘exception’ to the rule, Lozinskii believes Makhaevists to be a ‘rare exception.’” At this point Ivanov-Razumnik could triumphantly conclude: “No matter how much Makhaevshchina would defy the intelligentsia and socialism, it remained typical of intelligentsia social thought.” Indeed, Ivanov-Razumnik’s dissection of the Makhaevist position suggests that, much like the Mensheviks and the Bogdanovists, the Anarcho-Syndicalists contradicted themselves when they stated that the working class could arrive at consciousness without the assistance of a messianic intelligentsia at the same time volunteering to assume this very role. Ivanov-Razumnik argued that his Neo-Populist ethical approach to social analysis was radically opposed to Marxism. Yet this dichotomy, which he so carefully set up, was as frail as the dichotomy between Social Democrats and Makhaevists that he had so skillfully unraveled. Assimilating Marxism to economism, Ivanov-Razumnik failed to appreciate the eschatological surcharge of the Marxist class categories and consequently constructed a false opposition between Neo-Populism and Marxism. Ivanov-Razumnik had attempted to undermine the basic logic of Marxism, which he believed subverted itself. Marxism ostensibly drove every class analysis to unearth the particularist, “subjective” interest behind the object of analysis, at the same time passing itself off as a theory that supplied “universal” and thus “objective” explanations of social phenomena. As these 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

two claims were manifestly inconsistent with each other, the Marxist selfunderstanding had to be incoherent. Marxist adepts failed to realize, in this scenario, that the application of their social reductionism to themselves— Ivanov-Razumnik’s request that the author examine himself in terms of the argument of his book—was bound to show the Marxist position to be no less idiosyncratic and interest-driven than any other. Since the assertion that behind every opinion lurked an economic interest had to be, by the force of internal logic, a vehicle of interest in its own right, the Marxist, economically reductive paradigm precluded its proponents from making any universalist claims. The implication of such a proposition was obvious to contemporaries —not the Marxist but the Neo-Populist intelligentsia was the true prophet of emancipation. Ivanov-Razumnik shared Makhaev’s view that the pretensions of Marxists to be the representatives for universal justice while, at the same time, identifying themselves in class terms was self-contradictory. Unlike Makhaev, however, Ivanov-Razumnik was eager to salvage, not the reductive-scientific, but the ethical-universalist aspect of Marxist thinking. In calling for an application of a single rule to all speakers (either everybody sought economic advantages or it was possible to avoid this demeaning predicament and submit to the guidance of ethical imperatives), Ivanov-Razumnik clearly supported the second option. Sympathetic to the Marxist commitment to universalist social justice, he argued that it was impossible to maintain such a commitment without violating the dictum that ethics was inherently deceptive and motivated by class interests. Even if Marxists (and Makhaevists) denied this evident proposition, they still made ethical claims when they attempted to found their epistemology as universally valid. “The leap from a socioeconomic to an ethical determination is taken by this doctrine when the issue of the application of the socioeconomic method to the intelligentsia itself surfaces.” “What is the ‘intelligentsia’?” appeared as a focal issue again. Believing that he had reduced Marxism to an absurdity, Ivanov-Razumnik maintained that the Populist understanding of the intelligentsia as a “socioethical group” not a “socioeconomic class” had been proved as the only coherent position. The Marxist, class-based definition of the intelligentsia was impossible because any “critical thinker” who had a universalist goal in mind had to be included in the intelligentsia, regardless of his class affiliation. “Manual and mental workers can be members of the intelligentsia as well as professors and 

   “             ”:                      

semi-literate workers, provided they satisfy a certain socioethical criterion.” For Ivanov-Razumnik, the intelligentsia was constituted by inner ethical attributes and was characterized “not by the level of its ‘knowledge’ [znanie] but by the level of its ‘consciousness’ [so-znanie].” If knowledge was not self-reflective, if it did not engender consciousness, if it separated epistemic and ethical truths, then it only alienated humans from themselves and was worthless.¹²⁰ Ivanov-Razumnik was, of course, storming an open door. Despite what the Makhaevists were saying, Marxism and economic reductionism were not the same. Having construed the proletariat as a particularist class, IvanovRazumnik did not understand how Marxists could defend the interests of the proletariat and at the same time object to class interests on principle. Ivanov-Razumnik obviously failed to take cognizance of the eschatological role attributed to the proletariat in Marxist thought. Furthermore, unable to appreciate the Marxist contention that the Party intelligentsia was the only true intelligentsia because it alone recognized which class “carries History on its back,” Ivanov-Razumnik could not see how close the Marxist definition of the intelligentsia was to his own argument, namely that “only the spokesmen of the social forces that facilitate progress should be included within the ‘intelligentsia.’ ”¹²¹ Nor was economic reductionism absolutely alien to Ivanov-Razumnik. When coming to the subject of “Makhaev’s demagogic appeal” (precisely what was dangerous with any pseudo-intelligentsia), he stated: “Makhaevshchina is the ideology of the dark and unskilled workers and the unemployed.” Dismayed by Makhaev’s success among the “rabble” that “baited” the true intelligentsia (as he understood it, of course), Ivanov-Razumnik castigated his messianic rival, showing that only unconscious elements supported Makhaev: “Makhaev’s party is the party of the Lumpen Proletariat and the BlackHundreds!”¹²² On this last issue, Marxists closed ranks with Ivanov-Razumnik. Thus Kleinbort argued that “Makhaevshchina is a form of workers’ nihilism, a result of the preponderance of a mood over a world-outlook.”¹²³ When a messianic pretender had to be unmasked, participants in the eschatological discourse united for a moment. Despite bitter exchanges on the subject, Marxists and Neo-Populists shared a similar conception of the role of the intelligentsia in history. Both camps accepted the notion of an intelligentsia that has to be conscious of the course of history and willing to push it forward, 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

and the notion of a pseudo-intelligentsia that hindered emancipation from philistinism and greed—even as each camp presented itself as the former and all its adversaries as the latter. But this argument had to do not so much with values in the name of which the intelligentsia was supposed to speak— everybody agreed on political messianism—but with the identity of the class from which the redeemer was to come.

The “Intelligentsia” After October The  revolution had considerable effect on the notion of the intelligentsia. What it signified was open to different interpretations, depending on who articulated the Marxist narrative. For the Bolsheviks, the Great Revolution, completing the process begun in the  dress rehearsal, separated the intelligentsia wheat (those who sided with the Bolsheviks) from the intelligentsia chaff (all other errant intellectuals). The bourgeois reformist intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks further explained, got off the high road of history as early as the s. The cunning, and therefore more dangerous, Menshevik and SR intelligentsia clung to the revolutionary movement longer, seeking not only economic gains but also “liberal freedoms” that would promote the “interests of clerks.” At this point Menshevik history broke decisively with its Bolshevik equivalent. Defeated in their own country, the Mensheviks argued that they, not the Bolsheviks, were the true servants of History, armed with universalist consciousness that transcended national borders. In the Menshevik view, the underdeveloped national conditions had blinded the Russified Bolsheviks to the larger picture of proletarian struggle. Lenin, in this analysis, had managed to take advantage of this backwardness to stage a coup against history itself and to divert the revolution from its proper course. Instead of the emancipation of the international proletariat, the Bolsheviks had confined their horizons to the aspirations of a semi-peasant, particularist, and immature Russian mass. If the Bolsheviks were proud of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat they had brought into being, the Mensheviks believed that the Leninist regime betrayed the Russian working class, which quickly became the real victim of the November coup. Either way, the salvational morality play remained intact: a messianic intelligentsia, loyal to history and to the proletariat had battled a pseudo-intelligentsia that had duped the semi-conscious masses through a universalist pose. 

   “             ”:                      

The Bolsheviks believed that the intelligentsia betrayed the Revolution. According to Polonskii, “A group of people who played an extraordinary role in the history of the Russian emancipation, who summoned the Revolution as a savior, the intelligentsia turned its back on the Revolution, hoping to see the Revolution crucified.” The doyen of all Bolshevik historians, Mikhail Pokrovskii, talked about “the philistinization [omeshchanie] of the intelligentsia. The onetime anti-philistine intelligentsia found itself during the Revolution in the camp of its former enemies.” Proletcult publicists claimed that “posing as the proletarian vanguard, the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia actually strove to ride on the back of the proletarians during the Revolution”; “who would believe that our famous ‘supra-class’ and ‘supra-estate’ intelligentsia would conspire with the exploiting classes!” they exclaimed.¹²⁴ The quixotic revolutionary Karl Radek was amazed that “the workers’ assumption of power filled the intelligentsia with such apocalyptic fears. Disregarding the Marxist literature the intelligentsia had read and written itself, it came to see in the masses only an unrestrained element, incapable of anything constructive unless trained for a long time by the intelligentsia.” To be sure, elaborated Nikolai Meshcheriakov, a member of the Pravda editorial board: the intelligentsia had inscribed the word “socialism” on its banner. But almost always it perceived the term in an intellectualized manner, dreaming of socialism as something very beautiful but distant, . . . like the peaks of the Alps. The road to socialism was envisioned as slow and pleasant mountain climbing, . . . all the more unproblematic since the intelligentsia itself was to be the guide, the wise, humane intelligentsia which purported to reconcile bourgeois liberalism with proletarian socialism.

The Russian proletariat had carried out the revolution against the intelligentsia, not with it. “Hoping to serve as a head to the proletariat,” Meshcheriakov continued, “the intelligentsia found itself acting as a tail.”¹²⁵ Learning from what happened in , the working class no longer trusted the intelligentsia. “The epoch when ‘intelligentsia’ was synonymous with ‘revolutionaries’ is long gone,” stated Zinov’ev in . “Considering that the intelligentsia had tried to use its monopoly of knowledge against the Revolution, . . . it would have been surprising if such sabotage had not been answered by anti-intelligentsia sentiments in worker circles.”¹²⁶ The failure to support the Bolshevik seizure of power and the intelligentsia



The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

boycott of the proletarian dictatorship immediately after the revolution were sins not easily expiated. So much so, at times, that the radical-minded Bolsheviks denied that the intelligentsia was a fence-sitter and placed it squarely into the White camp. “It was the Russian intelligentsia, taking the form of mercenaries and officers in the armies of the various generals, that shot tens of thousands of workers and Red Army soldiers,” an anonymous Bolshevik stated in . “Slandering and accusing the Bolsheviks of ‘betrayal of the fatherland’ the intelligentsia invited the foreign bourgeoisie to fight against Soviet Russia.” Who but the intelligentsia “staffed the agitation and culture departments of the White generals, and edited all the Black Hundred and pogrom-inspiring publications and newspapers?”¹²⁷ The victorious Reds perceived the White leadership they put on trial as one big intelligentsia gang. The prosecutorial speeches of Nikolai Krylenko, the revolution’s Great Inquisitor, contained the harshest anti-intelligentsia diatribes to come from a mouth of a Bolshevik. Serving as the state prosecutor during the Tactical Center trial, Krylenko argued that the behavior of the defendants, the SR leadership accused of obstructing the proletarian revolution, “was particularly interesting as it sheds light on the period of Denikinshchina and Kolchakovshchina and illuminates the position of the intelligentsia during the working class’s ultimate ordeal. As one of the defense attorneys sitting here told me in a private conversation, we are witnessing here a trial of the activities of the Russian intelligentsia conducted by History itself.” Krylenko went on to subject the intelligentsia to a class analysis: “Besides such large social groups like landowners, merchants and industrial bourgeoisie, there was and is one other significant social layer—the intelligentsia. The class nature of the intelligentsia, . . . a subject examined by the best minds of revolutionary socialism for the longest time, has been reevaluated in recent years.” The adjectives used by Krylenko in describing the defendants—“intrusive chameleon,” “hereditary alcoholic and degenerate,” “imbecile”—evoke the rhetoric that portrayed the intelligentsia as effeminate and decadent. Krylenko’s concluding statement addresses the proletarian state with the following words: Comrade judges! The evidence . . . clearly shows that the Russian intelligentsia, entering the crucible of the Revolution with the placard “all power to the people” held high, exited the Revolution as an ally of the black generals, as the hired and obsequious agent of European imperialism. Having



   “             ”:                       desecrated its banners and covered them with mud, the intelligentsia lost the right to consider itself as the heir to the pioneers of the revolutionary struggle and the executor of their will. The intelligentsia led the war against Soviet power, taking advantage of the ignorance and darkness of the popular masses. It has outlived itself.

According to the prosecution, it was the “intermediary class nature of the intelligentsia” that made it try to strike out a halfway course between diametrically opposed class positions, which meant the “de facto desertion of the intelligentsia into the reactionary camp.”¹²⁸ Krylenko’s speech is an important reminder that in the s public debates and learned publications were not the only arenas in which discussions took place concerning the intelligentsia. Once the language of class became the official state language and the “intelligentsia” turned into a subject of interest not only for the Marxist social sciences but also for the Soviet state, it was no longer only studied but also acted upon. The verdict of the Bolshevik court had weightier consequences than any scientific verdict on which class exactly the intelligentsia belonged to. In the s, the Communist Party officially stripped the intelligentsia of all ethical value. Messianic significance was transplanted to the working class, which had recently proved its superior consciousness by successfully completing the first Marxist revolution on earth. All that remained in the hands of the “intelligentsia” was a formal knowledge, a know-how that could facilitate the journey the Party charted, but which posed no threat to the Party’s spiritual leadership. A prominent social psychologist, Zalkind, wrote: “The Party bears the mass collective physiognomy of the Russian working class.” The intelligentsia was reduced to a social group, at best an ally of the working class, and at worst a fellow traveler and dangerous fifth column. Katerina Clark’s study of the s proletarian fiction shows that the character described as a member of the intelligentsia had only a very tenuous resemblance to the old intelligentsia, even in the broadest sense. “The word ‘intelligentsia’ was now most often used officially to mean either all white-collar workers, or the old pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia exclusively, i.e., with the implication that the intelligentsia was now a completely outmoded institution.” As a result, the words used to designate the intelligentsia, “functioned almost as catch-all for every type of person of which the author disapproved.” André Mazon noted in his lexicon of  that, in Bolshevik speech, the terms “member of the intelligentsia” (intelligent), “intelligent” (intelligentnyi), and 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

“the intelligentsia class” (intelligentsiia) had taken on an offensive meaning. In the authoritative lexicon of Selishchev published in , the term “intelligentsia” appeared in the very negative context of “the declassed petitbourgeois intelligentsia.”¹²⁹ It is symptomatic that such old regime “arch-conservatives” as Pobedonostsev and Katkov were now mentioned among the “intelligentsia.” As long as the intelligentsia represented the vanguard of progress, reactionary intellectuals functioned as the intelligentsia’s antipodes. Now, when the intelligentsia came to mean merely educated individuals, it was sensible to include all intellectuals in its ranks. The literary critic Leopol’d Averbakh noted that the intelligentsia was no longer “capable of thinking in terms of a class struggle.” The social scientist and academician Semen Vol’fson referred to the intelligentsia as a blind conservative force, not the catalyst to History but a hindrance to it: “Our epoch vividly proves that by acting contrary to the working class, the intelligentsia is acting against its own class interests. History, as Plekhanov used to put it, grabs those who resist it by the scruff of the neck. Our contemporary intelligentsia has already felt the touch of History’s hand.”¹³⁰ The s Soviet press abounded with descriptions of the cognitive inferiority of the intelligentsia. Believing that the intelligentsia could not follow the artistic innovations of the revolution, the theatrical director Meierkhol’d recalled how, “on entering an auditorium and finding only intelligentsia there, I did not bother to address them but turned on my heels and went to the workers’ quarters.” The Bolshevik agitator Ingulov, when he reminisced about a political literacy course he had offered to military communications specialists, was equally contemptuous of the intelligentsia consciousness: First the intelligentsia maintained a grim silence. Then they started asking questions: “What is the difference between Bolsheviks and Communists?” “What made the Komintern secede from Profintern?” “Is it true that Martov was a Communist expelled during one of the purges?” . . . After the first two classes I came to realize that this audience required an unsophisticated form of address. A whole range of notions which had percolated into the proletarian lexicon was beyond the intelligentsia’s understanding.

Lev Kopelev, classified as a member of the intelligentsia, was told in : “Not made of the right material, you can never become a leader. Yes, you are well read, your gray cells work quite well. But you are all over the place, scat

   “             ”:                      

terbrained. You can’t tell the difference between what is fundamental and what is nonessential. If you become aware of your weaknesses, you may develop into a specialist, perhaps even a scholar. If not, you will remain an everlasting student, a superfluous man.” A worker bragged to Kopelev: “I can see out of my one worker’s eye better than any member of the intelligentsia can see out of his four eyes.” The Bolsheviks even blamed antisemitism on the intelligentsia, which “resented having to compete for government positions with the Jews.”¹³¹ A monologue by Ozhegov—a reputable teacher very popular with the Bolsheviks before the revolution but who now “felt lost in the new world” contained in the quasi-fictional diary by Nikolai Ognyov from —eloquently expressed the futility of intelligentsia identity in the new Russia: Yes, I admit I am an intellectual. There may be individual intellectuals, but there is no intelligentsia as a class. . . . The intelligentsia is played out. . . . It has vanished as completely as the gentry, the aristocracy, and the old Civil Service. . . . As a group, the intellectuals have been destroyed . . . by the logical process of history itself. . . . Engineers now work under the control of the workers. What new social movement do the engineers represent? None! . . . We’ve got to look facts in the face, comrades! It’s the Communists who are building the new order, the new forms of social life; it is they who act as cultural accelerators. . . . [The intellectuals] fought for the “people” for the welfare of the peasant and the worker, for general education. . . . But now, when the time has come to bring it all into practice, they find that their old ideas are “out of date,” that their banners are sold in the market together with all the other rubbish, that their ideals go no further than their women’s skirts. The intellectuals have become dull and stupid.

Conflation of the notion of the “intelligentsia” with the notion of the “intellectuals” was not a semantic insensitivity on Ozhegov’s part but an admission that the intelligentsia had lost its messianic luster. At one point somebody interrupted: “Contrary to what comrade Ozhegov says, the intelligentsia is represented at present by Red specialists. . . . At the present time, when throughout the Union of Soviet Republics the basis of Socialism is being built at a feverish speed, the intellectuals are regarded, not as obstructionists, but as people who fit into the structure.”¹³² Indeed, the Communist Party admitted it still needed the services of the intelligentsia specialists (spetsy). “It is infantile,” Lenin explained, “to believe that Communism can be constructed only by the hands of the Party mem

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

bers. They are a drop of water in a sea of people.” But the Party needed the assistance of the intelligentsia, not its guidance. The touchstone of revolutionary success, according to Lenin, was “our ability to assert strict supervision over the work of the intelligentsia so that with its hands, even if against its will, a deed conducive to Communism will be done.”¹³³ In the s, the phrase the “toiling intelligentsia” (trudiashchaiasia intelligentsiia) first came into general use. This is a hybrid term, and the adjective “toiling” had an expiatory overtone.¹³⁴ When not in the camp of the traitors, the “old intelligentsia” was construed as a bunch of philistine intellectuals. The semantic descendants of the “Party-inclined intelligentsia” (okolopartiinaia intelligentsiia), “fellow travelers” (poputchiki) could be instrumental to the Bolshevik agenda provided they renounced all messianic claims.¹³⁵ Bukharin was confident that he could forge a “Soviet intelligentsia” according to the Bolshevik needs: “Yes, we shall mint the intelligentsia, manufacture it as if in a factory. If Communism is our goal we should inculcate everybody with our idea.” Deprived of all but its sociological meaning (that of a self-contained social group independent from the proletariat), the intelligentsia fell from the status of Subject of History to the status of object. ¹³⁶ The relationship between the intelligentsia and the working class was reformulated, from a relation in which the intelligentsia played the guiding role to a “class alliance between the working class and the intelligentsia under the leadership of the former.” This alliance was not secure. Indeed, the burning issue as the Bolsheviks saw it was: Which was more likely, a revolutionary class alliance between the intelligentsia as a class and the proletariat as a class or a reactionary—but perhaps more natural—alliance between the intelligentsia and the petite bourgeoisie? A third option for the intelligentsia proposed by a radical Proletcult author was simply “to perish.”¹³⁷ Relieved from the responsibility of bringing workers to the light, the intelligentsia was commanded to “cling tightly” to the Revolution in order to be “enlightened by the proletariat.”¹³⁸ The relationship was still one of student and teacher, but the intelligentsia and the proletariat had switched positions, “and the intelligentsia came to be adopted by the proletariat.”¹³⁹ Lunacharskii elaborated: “It is the Party that sets the example now. The intelligentsia should not be the manager but the servant, the most energetic and dedicated servant of the masses. . . . There can be no talk of the intelligentsia sharing power.”¹⁴⁰ The Party’s banners, Lunacharskii suggested, “should call the intelligentsia either to join the Party or to cooperate as fellow travelers.”¹⁴¹ 

   “             ”:                      

Platon Kerzhentsev, an old Bolshevik journalist, deduced that “the more sensitive a member of the intelligentsia is the more likely he is to support Bolshevik power.”¹⁴² Theoretically, the intelligentsia could “dissolve into the proletariat” following the example of the Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharskii, and others. But only a “minority of the intelligentsia,” its “most conscientious part,” was capable of this feat.¹⁴³ This small group of the elect proved themselves by joining Bolshevism before the revolution, when dedication to the proletarian cause had been dangerous. The disputants on the subject of the intelligentsia agreed among themselves that “in this case we deal with a vanguard whose loyalty is beyond doubt. . . . The discipline of the underground forged this intelligentsia, together with a considerable cadre of proletarians, into the basis of the old Bolshevik party, the powerful leader of Russia’s future and to some extent the entire world. No misunderstanding exists between this intelligentsia and the working class, nor could it.” But by the s mass conversion of the intelligentsia was met with suspicion. The Party feared that the old intelligentsia was driven simply by the anxious desire to cooperate with those in power, a reaction typical of the petite bourgeoisie. Generally speaking, the old intelligentsia was expected to remain an autonomous, separate social layer, “fellow travelers” sharing with the “toiling peasantry” the role of a proletarian class ally. Only a complete proletarian victory could “pull the majority of the intelligentsia to the side of the proletariat.”¹⁴⁴ The Communist confiscation of the messianic attributes of the intelligentsia to swell the treasury of the Party, and the concomitant reduction of the meaning of the “intelligentsia” to a narrow-minded class, rekindled the debate on specifics of the social position of the intelligentsia.¹⁴⁵ Vol’fson reminded his readers that because “a social category cannot exist outside classes since that would mean existing outside society, the intelligentsia has to have a class determination.” Sakulin ridiculed the ethics-based definitions of the intelligentsia as “journalistic” and called for “a sociological principle to classify the intelligentsia in order to produce a scientific picture of the social fabric.” The Austrian Marxist Max Adler was credited with being “the first to give the intelligentsia not a moral but a sociological definition; and the first to understand that the intelligentsia is not an entity united by an historical pledge but a social layer which includes representatives of all professions engaged in mental labor.” Even when narrowly conceived of as a social group, however, the intelligentsia was a particularly difficult nut to 

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

crack. An anonymous author frankly admitted that “as long as human society remains divided into classes . . . the issue of the social physiognomy of the intelligentsia will remain engaging. There are as many opinions of the intelligentsia as there are opinion holders.”¹⁴⁶ Contemporary scholars who tried to understand which class the intelligentsia belonged to contradicted themselves and each other left and right. For example, on one hand Zinoviev maintained that the intelligentsia was not an autonomous class, on the other that the intelligentsia was an independent component of “the holy trinity—the proletariat, the peasantry, the intelligentsia.” The Bolshevik social scientists attempted to rectify this position, but only with partial success. Thus Chetkov was adamant that the intelligentsia was a class enemy of the proletariat because “the intelligentsia does not create value,” which means that it “must live off the workers’ surplus labor.”¹⁴⁷ Strongly disagreeing with Chetkov, Boris Gorev called the detractors of the intelligentsia to notice that, like the proletariat, this class creates labor value. “A price of a book, for example, reflects more than the price of the paper it is made of, the difference reflecting the amount of mental labor invested by the intelligentsia in the product.” Marx maintained that any labor immediately turns into a source of surplus extraction; according to Gorev, this analysis put the intelligentsia squarely into the camp of the exploited. Gorev asked emphatically: “What does it matter whether a certain labor satisfies material or spiritual needs?! Should the producer of children’s toys be called ‘a member of the intelligentsia’ and not the ‘working class’ just because his products do not have practical value?” The intelligentsia, he concluded, had “no economic motive to support the bourgeoisie.”¹⁴⁸ Associating the intelligentsia with the bourgeoisie, both Reisner and Meshcheriakov defined the intelligentsia as “technicians of social organization and professionals of ideological production” who are closer to craftsmen and skilled laborers—“classes with no interest in the abolition of capitalism.” But Meshcheriakov reversed this harsh verdict in accepting that the intelligentsia could also be a proletarian ally: “The capitalism of today is a decaying economic system. Permitting decreasing opportunities for intellectual work capitalism pushes the intelligentsia toward the working class.”¹⁴⁹ Lunacharskii represented another shade of opinion. Convinced of the intelligentsia’s “ambivalent class character,” he compared the intelligentsia to the “lumpen proletariat. Armed with no instruments, the intelligentsia is 

   “             ”:                      

different from the class of artisans. But the knowledge the intelligentsia has at its disposal constitutes a privilege that separates the intelligentsia from the unskilled workers.” Maintaining that “the ‘intelligentsia’—like another similar term, the ‘people’— combines elements from antagonistic classes,” Polonskii gave up on any pretension for scientific rigor. Pokrovskii complicated the picture further by pointing out that the intelligentsia was not a unitary class but rather a “motley, complex and unique group.” Solntsev and Lunacharskii added that its different sublayers were “attracted to the two opposite poles of the social spectrum.”¹⁵⁰ Struck by these inconsistencies, Sakulin offered to divide the intelligentsia in two: the “class intelligentsia” and the “declassed intelligentsia.” For Sakulin the intelligentsia could be either an autonomous class or a group attracted to the class that was strong enough to best remunerate intellectual labor.¹⁵¹ Vol’fson wrote the most extensive study on the subject. He dismantled the arguments of sociologists such as Gorev who tried to bring the intelligentsia within the orbit of the working class. “Some say that the intelligentsia came from a proletarian background and is therefore proletarian. . . . But it is ridiculous to claim that occupation can be the criteria for class; that would turn someone like Bebel, a onetime turner, into a member of the intelligentsia!” That the intelligentsia is proletarian because it “assists the working class conceptualizing its struggle theoretically” did not make sense to Vol’fson either. “This position substitutes ideology for an objective criteria that is alone pertinent when class identity is discussed. Finally,” wrote Vol’fson, “there are those who emphasize the proletarian lifestyle of the intelligentsia. . . . But their argument runs against the grain of Marxism according to which relation to means of production and not standard of living determines class position.” Attacking compromise positions no less ferociously, and maintaining that the intelligentsia “cannot be subsumed under the petite bourgeoisie either because it does not own tangible means of production,” Vol’fson ended up defining the intelligentsia as an “autonomous group” (gruppirovka) that was close to but not quite identical with the “laboring classes.” At the same time, however, he admitted the irreducible difference between the “bourgeois intelligentsia” and the “proletarian intelligentsia” when he stated that “practically every class has an intelligentsia layer, which functions as the ideological elite of that class.” This, of course, undermined Vol’fson’s attempt to see the intelligentsia as a distinct entity.¹⁵² To attempt a summary of the above discussion: some Marxist class theo

The “Intelligentsia”: Vicissitudes of the Notion

rists (such as Reisner and Meshcheriakov) maintained that, because of its role in the organization of capitalist production, the intelligentsia leaned toward the bourgeoisie. Others (such as Gorev) preferred to see it as a part of the working class. Finally, there were those who believed that the intelligentsia was not a “class” but a “social layer” (prosloika)—adjacent to the proletariat but not identical with it, because it has other sources of income and because it does not always sell its labor on the labor market as does the proletariat. The determinant in these debates was the definition of knowledge—was knowledge a “labor power,” susceptible to exploitation? or a “means of production” and as such a possible leverage of exploitation? While theorists often went back and forth between the different views, they all agreed that the intelligentsia had to be allocated a place in the class structure. This spelled out with remarkable clarity how from a supraclass entity, the paragon of universalism, the intelligentsia had degenerated into a particularist social group, one among many others. While seeking a provisional alliance with the old intelligentsia, the Party simultaneously set about creating a new vanguard, an intelligentsia of its own, that would be unquestioningly loyal to the Communist project, referred to interchangeably as the “new intelligentsia” (novaia intelligentsiia), the “Party intelligentsia” (partiinaia intelligentsiia), or the “proletarian intelligentsia” (proletarskaia intelligentsiia).¹⁵³ “The old intelligentsia has died out,” Lunacharskii explained. “Who will replace it? Should we allow the petite bourgeoisie to do so? Of course not. We must prepare a new intelligentsia out of the worker and peasant youth.”¹⁵⁴ A Bolshevik student believed that “what distinguishes the construction of the Communist intelligentsia from the construction of the bourgeois intelligentsia is the fact that in our country everybody is developing and the intelligentsia is not becoming a separate layer.” The “new intelligentsia,” according to Kerzhentsev, “is created not from the offspring of the bourgeois class, but from the ranks of the proletariat and the peasantry. This genuinely socialist intelligentsia . . . will be linked to the proletariat by ties of blood and will cement the socialist republic into a mighty whole.” Kuz’min admonished the old intelligentsia for failing to see that “the proletariat creates its own intelligentsia, . . . one that truly deserves to be called the ‘proletarian vanguard’ because it shoulders all the burdens of the class struggle.” Speaking “in the capacity of a member of the old intelligentsia,” Sakulin solemnly passed the messianic torch: “I permit myself to salute the young worker-peasant intelligentsia. With its emergence 

   “             ”:                      

we hope that the social injustice expressed in the isolation of mental labor from manual labor will be eliminated. Once that is done, the life of each and every one of us will have a full resonance.”¹⁵⁵ With the rise of the Communist Party, the tenure of the old intelligentsia as a messiah expired. Like the Jews, who gave birth to Christ but failed to convert to Christianity, the intelligentsia became, from the point of view of the Bolshevik version of eschatology, a reactionary force. Just as the conversion of the Jews was to symbolize the Second Coming of Christ, the intelligentsia’s future dissolution into the proletariat would signal the full emancipation of humanity.



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

4

THE 1920S BOLSHEVIKS sought to turn the universities into “construction sites” for the fabrication of the New Man. The young state was determined to have the institutions of higher education function as the meeting place of the working class and its consciousness. Inevitably, the old intelligentsia proved an obstacle, insisting on civic liberties, occupying the universities, and refusing to turn them over to the proletariat. Lenin set the tone for the Bolshevik enterprise when he summarily rejected the idea that education could be indifferent to class. “The very term ‘apolitical,’ ” he said in November , “is a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy, nothing but a deception of the masses. . . . We must put the matter frankly, and openly declare that education cannot help but be connected to politics.”¹ The method the Bolsheviks exploited in taking over the universities evolved during the period –. Shortly after the seizure of power, on February , , the recently formed Bolshevik equivalent of the ministry of education, Narodnyi kommissariat prosveshcheniia (Narkompros), asserted its full authority over all educational institutions. The Party also kept a hand in educational matters, “guiding” state institutions in all sensitive matters. Gradually, a network of Bolshevik university organs was organized and put in charge of sovietizing the universities and proletarianizing the student body. A number of the academic institutions that had been created by the provisional government were preserved but they were persuaded to cooperate with the new regime (and when necessary coerced into doing so). The significance of the battle to gain control over higher education transcends issues of routine administration. Rather than fulcrums in the leveling 

              “               ”

of blind power, the institutions that took part in the battle are better understood as embodied discursive formations. The legitimacy relied on by the academic organs to confer a certain matrix of meanings to the student body was not just the result of who had invested them with authority or what political purpose they fulfilled but was also a function of the language they spoke. Let us consider some of the key terms. The “university Party cell,” for example, was a meaningful body with a legitimate right to intervene in student affairs since the Bolshevik Party was invested with the task of producing a “new intelligentsia.” By contrast, such terms as “administration boards” or “professorial professional commissions” suggest that liberal university institutions downplayed issues of class and justified themselves in terms of academic autonomy and scholarly freedom. The criteria according to which members were admitted to the various institutions were also significant in this context, highlighting in microcosm the assumptions held by the contending sides as to how the body politic should be organized. Whereas only workers and their class allies could enroll in university Party cells, members could be drawn from groups having nothing to do with academic studies—such as the maintenance personnel. Conversely, only individuals with scholarly credentials could participate in the work of the strictly academic bodies within the universities. The various bodies active on the Soviet academic scene were often locked in a bitter struggle, doing their best to enforce the specific social cosmology they represented on the student body. Whereas the Party cells pressed for immediate proletarianization, academic organizations engaged in a rearguard struggle to defend a meritocracy of knowledge.² On a deeper plane, there was much that brought the sides together. Despite their heterogeneous origins and divergent agendas, all academic bodies shared in the social theory of representation that the revolution had bequeathed to Soviet political discourse. All political agents justified action through claims to popular legitimacy and to representing equality and freedom. All agreed that class was the alpha and omega of life in the Soviet university: the quality of the new intelligentsia was a direct function of its social origins. Even opponents of Bolshevik-style proletarianization believed that the social injustices of the old regime had to be redressed and that the weak classes had somehow to be compensated. Who was to be promoted to the university? The “working class”? The “toilers”? The “entire nation”? Were the political programs that were carried out in the name of this or that class ade

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

quate to its size and real interests? These were the questions that preoccupied contemporaries, regardless of their political persuasion. The Party exercised its influence over the universities through its vast political apparatus. Even while it delegated a degree of power, Moscow always kept a firm grasp on the initiative. Although the relevant s decrees were signed by the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), they all originated with the Communist leadership and were approved by the Party organs. Signals from the center often radically altered class policies, rehabilitating some social groups and condemning others. By saying that changes in the meaning of class categories emerged out of policy shifts at the apex of the system, I do not mean, of course, that class was a dictate from above and not a question of discourse, but rather, that the discourse of class in the Soviet Union was one in which the Party played a central role. Discourse mattered; my point is not that class meanings were democratically determined after a free exchange of opinion but that the center never had, nor could have had, complete control over the production of meaning. The rank-and-file cadres in the universities and the students themselves usually had at least some latitude in interpreting the decrees coming from Moscow and in identifying who belonged with the “proletarians” and who with the “bourgeois.” Even the ideological center was never absolutely monolithic. The secretariat of the Central Committee, the Party’s agitprop departments, the provincial and district bodies and finally the rank-and-file university Party cells often clashed over how to implement proletarianization. This being said, we have to bear in mind that too sharp a disjuncture between state and Party institutions and figures misses the mark in more than one way. The Soviet government was based on the interlocking of the state and the Party personnel. Lunacharskii was a Bolshevik of long standing and so was his deputy, Pokrovskii. When these two Party leaders opposed the exclusivist educational policy of Komsomol (the All-Russian Leninist Communist Youth League), this did not amount to flouting the Party line—it was, rather, that they promoted a soft interpretation thereof. A similar divergence of opinions existed within the professoriate. Whereas many professors resented the Party and longed for “liberal freedoms,” others were dedicated Communists who preferred the ultraproletarian line of the local Party cell to the conciliatory policies emanating from the Narkompros collegium.³ There were few disagreements among the Bolsheviks, however, when the danger of class contamination was discussed: “NEP influences” and “degen

              “               ”

eration” were evils that were universally acknowledged. Party organs never missed an opportunity to stress that, in the face of the recent retreat from Communism, the unity of the Soviet body politic had to be vigorously defended. The same Tenth Party Congress that legalized NEP bourgeois economics also prohibited any corresponding bourgeois politics. Since no Communist was prepared to see the Party split into rival factions, political arguments could be conducted only on the basis of the Leninist principles of democratic centralism. The Bolshevik obsession with unity penetrated the vocabulary routinely employed in official discourse; the famous Soviet theorist of language Selishchev has pointed out the remarkable frequency with which Communists described Soviet institutions as “monolithic” (monolitnye), “unassailable” (tverdye), and “clad with steel” (stal’nye).⁴ The intense social engineering to which the Soviet university submitted in the s had as its foundation the notion that the student body required constant purification. Thinking in eschatological categories, the Party ranked the members of the student body according to their class purity. The student body was divided into Communists/proletarians, petit bourgeois, and class aliens. The first were supposedly bathed in the light of Communism; the last had never embarked on the path toward the light; the remaining students, who constituted a majority, were located somewhere along the road to salvation. How purity was to be achieved was much disputed and revised, as Bolsheviks changed their political course again and again. Representing a distinct historical epoch in one sense, the s can be divided into a number of discrete subperiods, separated by more or less subtle changes in the signals the Party was sending out. The Party constantly altered its priorities, taking into account modifications in eschatological diagnostics, the vicissitudes of the factional struggle at the top, and the need to meet external and internal challenges to the regime. Debates over which social group might be the most suitable raw material for the new intelligentsia had a particularly complex history. The initial stress on orthodox proletarianization was followed in the mid-s by a shortlived adjustment to the needs of the neglected peasantry. Next in line for attention were the offspring of the old intelligentsia, and then, toward the end of the decade, exclusivist proletarianization was resumed at breakneck speed. All these changes reflected an ongoing argument regarding the inclusiveness of the proletariat and the messianic value of the transitional classes adjacent 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

to the industrial working class. Below I shall examine this process in some detail and identify which Party leaders and political agencies stood behind the process. Here it is sufficient to note that shifts in policy were expressed and transmitted through the use of class terminology. The bulk of my material for the study of proletarianization comes from Petrograd (Leningrad) and Tomsk. Whereas Petrograd was a former capital, an educational center second only to Moscow and proud of its large “conscious” and combatant working class, Tomsk was the “Siberian Athens,” the academic capital of Asiatic Russia. A comparison of the two cities provides a view of the differences between the industrial North and the agricultural East. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat had faith in industrial Petrograd, where workers were numerous, but expressed anxiety regarding the Siberian peasant and petit bourgeois population of Tomsk. In addition, the regions differed politically: Petrograd was the cradle of the revolution, a bastion of the new regime, whereas Tomsk was a former White territory, which rendered its population highly suspect in the eyes of the Bolsheviks. The Petrograd revolutionary tradition, however, was not free from problems. The city had a history of Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary sympathies and its Communist contingent was “oppositionist” and prone to “deviations.” These regional peculiarities complicated the process of university proletarianization and the creation of the workers’ intelligentsia, because of a lack of raw material (that is, proletarians) in Tomsk, or because of ideological wavering in Petrograd. Having said all this, however, I do not intend the presentation below to be a regional study. Instead, it aims to be a pair of “micro studies.” In fact, the Bolshevik discourse of class imposed a remarkable degree of uniformity, which flattened such regional idiosyncrasies as those of Petrograd and Tomsk.⁵ Although I will not ignore the regional peculiarities of Petrograd and Tomsk, I will not emphasize them; rather than compare specific regions and their social relations, I will examine specific universities undergoing proletarianization. Petrograd and Tomsk universities provide a unity of time, place, and story that is necessary to a micro study of Bolshevik proletarianization. Basing such a study on the sources from a handful of academic institutions has obvious limitations. The role of agencies that were major players in proletarianization remains inadequately understood. Why did the Central Committee choose to send its “signals” when it did, and the way it did? Why did government 

              “               ”

decrees keep bringing the “peasantry” and the “intelligentsia” in and out of favor? Why were purges of the student body common in the early s and almost unknown in the middle of the decade? And why did purges return with such ferocity in ? Only very tentative answers to these questions will be offered below. Deeper explanations would rest on the secrets of Moscow’s policy making and would entail a careful study of the central Narkompros and Party archives. The type of micro history I undertake has its advantages, however, in that it enables me to move beyond impressionistic generalizations drawn from heterogeneous contexts, and to examine the actual relationships between individuals, institutions, and political language and practice that took place on a daily basis in a number of specific environments. Because many aspects of institutional life (place, function, personnel, and so on) remain stable, I can better isolate the variables of greatest interest to my study —class categories and the practices that enforced them—and look at how they changed during the s. The genesis and consolidation of Bolshevik academic institutions is often presented in memoirs and histories of the period as something like a class war. Those who see this war as a crusade against academic freedom deplore it, whereas others praise the war as the assertion of proletarian entitlement to education. Unfortunately, both approaches lead to the reification of social categories. When one focuses on the institutional struggle within the universities and when one speaks of proletarian/Communist agents fighting against intelligentsia/liberal agents, one assumes the objective existence of opposing social groups—proletarian students and intelligentsia students. It is, however, more accurate to describe the “proletariat” and the “intelligentsia” not as social groups but as discursive notions that did not so much reflect the existence of classes as actually construct them in the first place. The ways students identified themselves suggest that the university proletarianization was not so much a process of social change, pure and simple, as it was an introduction of the discourse of class into the Soviet academic system. What is significant is not that new people came to the universities but that those who did so had to present themselves in totally new ways. An examination of university proletarianization reveals that classes, rather than being an objective given, were flexible discursive artifacts, made and unmade depending on the vagaries of time. It is fascinating to see how, during the battle over student souls, classes said to have a certain historical pedigree were actually constituted for the first time through their demands for 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

education and representation in academic bodies. Social engineering was the order of the day. Few doubted that classes had to be identified and promoted and that the student body had to be remade. Dramatic changes resulted from the adoption of the language of modern interventionist politics: anyone who wished to be included in the student body, let alone represent student constituencies, employed this language.

The Bolsheviks Take Over the Universities Initially, the Bolsheviks supported the Provisional Government’s liberal policy toward higher education. Hoping that open admissions would result in a predominantly working-class, pro-Bolshevik student body, Narkompros issued a decree on August , , abolishing all admissions requirements for higher educational institutions (except the minimum age of sixteen). Nor did Narkompros immediately move to limit the student self-rule that was granted by the Provisional Government: a decree of November , , assigned substantial power within the university to “student councils” (starosstaty; literally, “councils of student elders”) elected yearly by all students, including those that had been disenfranchised by the  constitution.⁶ As they became increasingly aware of the student and faculty bodies’ hostility to the new regime, however, the Bolsheviks became concerned about their tenuous control over the universities. A number of hastily organized academic groups in Petrograd refused to recognize the Soviet government. Thus when the Petrograd Council of Professors was offered the opportunity to take part in preparations for educational reforms in February , it was decided to hold off from any association with Narkompros. The liberal members of this organization announced that they considered the Bolsheviks to be usurpers, and that they regarded the Constituent Assembly as the only legitimate government.⁷ Except for a minuscule contingent of Communist youngsters, most of whom soon entered the ranks of the Red Army, the student body as a whole proved equally unsympathetic to the new regime. The assumption that students were opposed to Bolshevism was so widespread that during street fighting in Petrograd a youngster was able to cross White lines simply by showing his student card. At the peak of the Civil War, student councils in Petrograd refused to respond to government calls for mobilization, explaining that they “did not consider the Bolshevik Dictatorship to be legitimate.”⁸ 

              “               ”

With the Kolchak and Denikin offensives of , the Bolsheviks were prompted to reverse their conciliatory policy toward the universities; they resorted to controlling them from without through administrative coercion. In February  Narkompros declared a state of emergency and instituted the so-called committees for social defense and labor enforcement. Generally referred to by the catchy nickname troiki, these bodies were staffed by a representative of Narkompros, the local soviet, and the students. Administrators were elected in accordance with Soviet class-based electoral laws. Bolshevik measures to assert control were reinforced by the appointment of so-called plenipotentiary commissars (upolnomochenye kommissary) from the ranks of the Party apparatus. The commissars enjoyed the right to a decisive vote on university presidiums and a veto on all decisions made by students or professors. Narkompros instructions, as written into the nomination bill of the Moscow university commissar, were unequivocal: the commissar “has the right to nullify faculty decisions. His dictates have to be obeyed by all faculty members, who otherwise will face a revolutionary tribunal.”⁹ The famous sociologist Pitrim Sorokin recalled that the commissar assigned to Petrograd State University, Tsviback, “took away all Rector Shimkevich’s . . . seals and declared that he himself was now the head of the university.”¹⁰ To buttress the commissars’ authority, Narkompros created “revolutionary committees” (revkomy), which functioned hand in hand with the commissars and were staffed by members of the Party, the Komsomol, or by workers’ activists. The commissars were responsible for the implementation of Sovnarkom decrees, the proper functioning of Communist representatives in various branches of the university bureaucracy, the organization of the local Party cells, and the enforcement of Soviet propaganda campaigns. On June , , autonomous student councils were officially abolished. There was still student participation on all levels of the university administration, but from now on, at least half of the members of the elected bodies had to be Communists.¹¹ This was not sufficient, however. Since the use of open admissions had failed to proletarianize the student body, the Bolsheviks sought new measures to inject “real workers” into the universities. Lunacharskii noted sadly that after the revolution, “the majority of the students abandoned the working class and joined hands with the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie.”¹² The “young proletarian intelligentsia,” he admitted, was minuscule. To reinforce its position and to take over higher education from the old intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks instituted “workers’ faculties” (rabfaki). 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

First formed at Moscow Institute of National Economy on an experimental basis, in  the workers’ faculties became an obligatory supplement to every higher educational institution and gradually developed into a very important means of proletarianization. On one occasion Bolshevik leaders compared the workers’ faculties to a Trojan horse; on another they described them as “siege ladders attached to university windows, used by the worker and peasant youth to climb into the universities.” One particularly bold article drew parallels between the workers’ faculties’ storming of higher education and the Red Army’s famous storming of Perekop. This meant, of course, that the old intelligentsia’s hold over the universities was consonant with the Whites’ last stand during the Civil War.¹³ Academically, the workers’ faculty was no more than a special school that offered its adult students a secondary-level education. Their political significance meant that workers’ faculties became as important as the universities themselves, however. Although actually enrolled in a secondary school, trainees enjoyed all the official prerogatives of college students. Not only were they to be admitted to all student gatherings (skhodki), but they had voting rights in university governing bodies. Both Narkompros’s original policy statement and the recommendation of the Bolshevik Central Committee Educational Conference called for integrating workers’ faculties into the higher educational system, as equal partners with regular faculties; this process was a key tool for the proletarianization of the universities. The workers’ faculties were very close-knit; they had their own Communist Party organization and could be relied on to get a good percentage of Bolshevik sympathizers to attend all politically important meetings.¹⁴ Despite all these measures, the end of the Civil War found higher education barely affected by Soviet power. The Bolsheviks were uneasy because “the universities seem still to rely on old principles, old habits, and old professorial cadres.” And the First Conference on People’s Education that met in Moscow between December , , and January , , reiterated: “Higher education must be conquered.”¹⁵ With the inauguration of NEP, however, the means toward that end had to change. Seeking a middle ground between establishing military control over the universities and completely abandoning them to their political opponents the Bolsheviks abolished the university commissars in early .¹⁶ The director of the Petrograd Department of Public Education, operating on the instructions of Zinoviev, refused to honor commissars’ mandates. 

              “               ”

Bitterly resentful and unable to rely on broad student support, university Party cells expressed doubts regarding their hold over the universities. Party zealots in Petrograd Technological Institute maintained that “a commissar was the ‘workers’ watchdog’ over the ‘unreliable’ students. . . . We cannot rule without him since our cell is not a juridical subject [iuridicheskoe litso]. The commissar is an absolutely indispensable representative of Soviet Power, the only agency capable of halting any sort of counterrevolutionary steps taken by professors or students. . . . We need prerogatives similar to those of the military committees in the Red Army units.” But the techniques borrowed from the civil war were now outmoded. The Party leadership openly regretted “the inability of the Communists recently returned from the front to adjust to a peaceful environment” and stuck by its decision to get rid of the commissars.¹⁷ The decree on the Administration of the RSFSR Universities promulgated by Narkompros on March , , established the contours of NEP educational reforms. The statute restructured the university administration and abolished all remnants of its autonomy. Whatever hopes previously entertained by the liberal professors and students that encroachments on their academic freedom had been an exigency of the civil war were now flattened. All institutions of higher education remained under the firm authority of Narkompros, which was solely responsible for any organizational or personnel changes. The new statute vested executive power in the “university soviet,” which consisted of five representatives from the ranks of professors, instructors, academic workers, and student groups. Since this was a time “of reintegration of the universities into the general system of soviet institutions,” these representatives were joined by an unspecified number of nominees from commissariats, executive committees, and other governmental bodies. Narkompros expressed confidence that the university soviet would guarantee “compliance with the Soviet policy, smothering the corporate immunities of the professoriate.”¹⁸ The Party cell became another important tool of the Bolshevik government. During the Civil War, Party cells were practically nonexistent in the universities and the Bolsheviks relied on citywide Communist student organizations.¹⁹ But in  the network of university Party cells dramatically expanded and was put under the supervision of the local Party district committee and Narkompros.²⁰ The Party warned against any attempt by Party cells to substitute any cell for the university administration—such practices 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

were now dubbed “Civil War administrative despotism.” Criticizing the “excessive zeal” of those university cells that had alienated professors from the Bolshevik cause, Lenin warned that “despotic university Party cells will be pitilessly thrashed!”²¹ The Party urged the Party cells to limit their activities to serving as a moral influence on the university soviet and to expressing “Party judgment” on membership candidates to that body. Taken as a whole, the  regulations brought into sharp relief Bolshevik tactics for gaining control over higher education—a combination of supervision from above (representatives of outside governmental structures injected into the university soviets) with an attempt at pressure from below (through the university Party cells). While it is true that throughout NEP the relative integrity of academic bodies and associations of the professoriate was respected, politically these institutions were emasculated.²² Students and professors who tried to resist were forced to emigrate or were incarcerated.²³ The implementation of the university statute varied according to local conditions. In –, Petrograd witnessed a major campaign for the enforcement of “NEP in education.” The council on issues of higher education sponsored by the local Party organization resolved that “better control has to be asserted over the thirty-two universities and eight workers’ faculties functioning in the city.” A reformed administrative machinery was soon set in motion and new university soviets were elected. Later in the year the Petrograd Party provincial committee stressed the importance of treading softly. “Cheka methods,” the committee declared, “are outdated. The Party cells have to interest the petit bourgeois student mass in the construction of Soviet universities. We have to eradicate whatever prejudices this class may have.” The newly appointed Petrograd Party coordinator of student affairs, Arshavskii, celebrated in October  the first fruits of the new policies: A substantial change is noticeable in the local situation. Whereas in the previous year organized work among students was impossible, the present influx of proletarian students into the universities has substantially altered the physiognomy of our universities. . . . Though it was still dominant only one year ago, the influence of the old intelligentsia has given way to new attitudes.²⁴

In Petrograd military rule was dismantled in , whereas in Tomsk, just “liberated” from the Whites, it was only now in the process of being instated. Until the middle of the decade the region was ruled not by a civilian soviet but by the Siberian Revolutionary Committee—a civil war–type rev

              “               ”

olutionary committee. The professors of Tomsk, many of whom had supported the Kolchak offensive, were hostile to the new government, and the Tomsk student body was no less suspect. Having attracted thousands of retreating White soldiers, Tomsk universities were described by the Bolsheviks as “dens of counterrevolution.” This situation led the Siberian Party organization to decide, in March , to govern Tomsk universities through the Collegium for the Administration of Tomsk Higher Education—a bombastic name for militarized revolutionary troikas and GPU. From June  Konstantin Molotov was the chairman of this body.²⁵ Bolshevik language followed closely on the heels of the Bolshevik emissaries. Class identities were first articulated in Soviet universities during the confrontation between what was construed as a purely proletarian institution, the workers’ faculty, and the university, that “bastion of the intelligentsia.” According to the Bolshevik narrative, from the very start workers’ faculties had to engage in a status war against both regular university students and the professoriate. In Tomsk, for example, the workers’ faculty reportedly was called by Dean Ugarov “the plunderers’ faculty” (punning on rabochii fakul’tet versus razboinichii fakul’tet).²⁶ The atmosphere at the Petrograd State University of the early s was little different. Markova, a history student there, recalled how a “young man dressed like a student” addressed a would-be member of the workers’ faculty who was trying to make his way into a railroad car headed for Petrograd: I will not let you in! This is a student car! . . . “But I am going to study!” declared the other young man in his own defense. “How can you prevent me from going?” “No way! The workers’ faculty is no university. What kind of student are you . . . dragging your feet into a student car!” This was the answer he got. “Comrade, comrade! This is unfair,” the boy insisted. “I am not your comrade!” the student retorted, completely losing his temper. Addressing a man standing nearby, who also wore the clothing of a student, he said, “Colleague! Help me kick him out. . . . This son of a bitch calls himself a ‘student’!”

Only on arriving in Petrograd did Markova realize that those who had barred the way to the workers’ faculty student were “old-timers, the White-guard students.” Markova eventually sketched a cultural profile of the old intelligentsia as she perceived it, proud of its academic tradition and contemptuous of the proletariat besieging the university. She went on to describe the



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

showdown between workers’ faculty students and regular faculty students during the stormy discussion of the new university statute; like so many others, she used the interpretive framework of “class struggle”: Uninvited, workers’ faculty students showed up at the official student meeting dedicated to discussing proletarianization. When he realized what had happened, one of the Kadets jumped on the stage and protested. “Colleagues, men have come from the workers’ faculty. These are not university students and it is not their business to discuss a serious question of university autonomy. We must protest! We are not willing to inhabit the same space they do.” Somebody from the crowd of old students raised his voice: “Whoever is with us, please proceed to the physics auditorium to decide the matter. Follow us, colleagues, follow us.” The “colleagues” pointedly broke into the student hymn—“Gaudeamus”—as they filed out of the hall. . . . When Communists tried to speak at the meeting of the Kadet and Menshevik students organized shortly afterward they were pulled from the stage, prevented from addressing the audience, and, funny as it may be, challenged to duels!

Such anecdotes are multiple in nature. In another instance, after workers’ faculty students were chased out of the hall where a meeting of the students of Petrograd Technological Institute was taking place in November , the institute’s administration, to the dismay of our Bolshevik source, held a referendum on whether workers’ faculty students should be considered students at all.²⁷ What is to be made of such stories? Even if we believe the Bolshevik allegation that most of the regular students had some sort of reservations about workers’ faculties, the assertion of a clear-cut division of the student body into those who supported workers’ faculties and those who opposed them can hardly be sustained. The attitude of SRs or Mensheviks toward this “proletarian institution” is best described as ambivalent; it was definitely not totally hostile. Speaking before an émigré audience, an SR named Zhaba who had recently left the Soviet Union admitted that “the negative aspects of the workers’ faculty are noticeable.” At the same time, however, he sharply distinguished himself from those who might have felt elitist contempt for the new institutions and recalled that he had generally welcomed the workers’ faculty students to the university. A Menshevik named Abramovich who was a student committee speaker at the Petrograd State University agreed that workers’ faculties had the right to exist within the university system.²⁸



              “               ”

Judged simply in terms of their factual accuracy, the Bolshevik descriptions of the cultural and the political situation in early s universities are clearly simplistic and tendentious. The crux of the issue, however, is that the Bolshevik political discourse was best suited not to the task of recording reality but to creating a black-and-white version of reality. The showdown between workers’ faculty students and regular students (osnovniki) was construed as a “class struggle” and the “with us”/”against us” dichotomy predominated. Contemporary Bolshevik publicists contended that “since university students are all the offspring of the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie, whereas workers’ faculty students are all proletarians, the economic contradictions between classes are transplanted into the university.”²⁹ When the mass of students, who care more about learning than about political debates, was not completely effaced, it was inserted between two antagonistic class camps and framed as “the swamp” (boloto)—a term borrowed from the political language of the French Revolution to denote the baleful, politically spineless center doomed to gradual disappearance.³⁰ Similarly, when Bolshevik witnesses described how, during the election of the governing body of Petrograd University’s cooperative, Communist students sang the “Internationale” and their opponents sang “God Save the Tsar,” they elided all the nuances separating the platforms of the various political parties. Those who would sing the “Internationale” were Bolsheviks and Bolsheviks only, although the Mensheviks were even more keen on the song, whereas everybody else belted out the monarchist hymn, “God Save the Tsar.” The Bolshevik language did not so much misrepresent reality as shape it by framing issues and cutting off political alternatives.³¹ The Bolsheviks articulated the opposition between regular and workers’ faculty students in terms of the following opposed pairs: worker

bourgeois

blacksmith

member of the intelligentsia

Red Army veteran

White Army soldier

workers’ faculty student

regular student

Since these pairs derived meaning from “class struggle,” the opposition between worker and bourgeois was the key to the organization of the chain. The worker was often depicted as a blacksmith wielding a heavy hammer and wearing a leather apron. The bourgeois was equated with the intelli

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

gentsia, a group that stood accused of having assisted capitalists in the exploitation of the proletariat by instilling in workers erroneous ideas. It was not hard to see where the sympathies of the opposing groups lay in military confrontations. While the Red Army prided itself on being the “workers’ army,” the White Army called on the intelligentsia to swell its ranks. The series of pairs listed above concludes with the identification of the opposing classes in the university setting. The regular students were the “bourgeoisie” and the workers’ faculty students (or students of Communist universities) the “proletariat.” To engage in symbolic war successfully, individuals had to master the poetics of the Bolshevik class language. The Soviet universities of the s manufactured an endless array of texts, including class admissions graphs, student biographies, denunciations, and appeals—each of them informed by class language and none of them susceptible to self-evident decoding. For the most part, if we are to understand what we read, we have to learn how class meaning was produced in the Bolshevik discourse, and which symbols created which class connotations. The virtue of the graphic representation of Bolshevik discourse (see chart ) resides in its ability to show how class attributes were interrelated. It is not self-evident, for instance, that workers’ faculty students, who often matriculated after performing agricultural labor or Red Army service, should stand for the “working class.” The identification of the regular students, the vehement revolutionaries of yesterday, as the “bourgeoisie” is even less probable at first sight. How was the reader of Bolshevik prose supposed to know which symbols invoked the image of the “working class” and which symbols called to mind the “intelligentsia” or the “petite bourgeoisie”? Decipherment of the symbolically encoded class affiliations had to follow a series of shifts in the signifier; only after a series of carefully executed “discursive deductions” was the signified—class identity—finally reached. Diagram  is designed to sketch the Bolshevik class matrix that guided contemporaries in deciphering the class identity of any particular student. It takes the concept of a “worker” and extends this concept along two axes, a chain of metaphors and the chain of metonymies. First we have to consider the chain of metaphors, which are vertically represented—those substitutes for the “working class” that replace it entirely. Next we draw the diagonal lines from every metaphor of the working class to its metonym. The new chain, which represents various attributes of working-class identity, is represented by the horizontal line. 

              “               ”

 . The Bolshevik poetics of the proletariat

Examined separately, symbols could have had contingent meanings. Had our analysis stopped at the level of discrete notions, the symbolic use of the rifle or the hammer by students who attempted to describe themselves as proletarians would have been incomprehensible. The connection between rifle and “Red Student Day” would not make any sense unless we knew that workers carry the former and celebrate the latter. Isolated from the chain of working-class metaphors, “rifle” or “hammer” can enter various cultural schemes and be associated with notions that have nothing to do with Bolshevism: “bourgeois militarism” (rifle), for example, or the “avarice of the greedy little dwarfs” from the Nibelungen (hammer). The symbols of working-class identity came to be interrelated and began to function as denotations of proletarian identity only when inserted in a set of metaphors for the working class, such as the “workers’ faculty student” or “Red Army soldier” and interpreted as a part of a complex semiotic field. The meaning of proletarian identity was not immediately clear. The symbolic effort that went into its construction was obvious only to the initiated. Consider the workings of the slogans that adorned a prominent student journal:



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia” . The Revolution and the Party Need a Man—He is to combine the attributes of a Fighter, a Destroyer and a Builder. This is what the students at the Sverdlov University should be like. . Sverdlov University Student, Measure Yourself by the Old Guard’s Yardstick! Higher the Banner, Stronger the Hammer! Preserve the following unity: A Book—A Life—A Rifle! . Students of Sverdlov University—Children of the Rising Workers and Peasants!—The Revolution Pushed Them Forward, The Party Educated Them, The Civil War Forged Them.³²

The symbols that invested these slogans with meaning encapsulated much of the meaning of Communism. The basic trajectory was evident: “Proletarian —soldier (in the Red Army)—student (in the classless university)—Communist (in the classless universe).” The structure hinted at a narrative. The first item in the chain, “proletarian,” stood in relation to its end, “Communist,” as potentiality does to actuality. The links in the chain were necessary phases preceding the ultimate Communist consciousness. The road to be traversed was the eschatological continuum from darkness to light—the path to emancipation. If we look at the first of the slogans cited above, we find that it is a sketch of the ideal proletarian of the future, someone masculine, vibrant, and active. The second slogan delved deeper into the proletarian ideal and outlined the future unity of work (hammer) and might (rifle) with thought (a book). The Party that was to bring this change about was alluded to by a reference to the Communist “Old Guard.” The third slogan completed the message. The Party came to the fore in its role as emancipating agency, taking real proletarians by the hand, overcoming with them the purgatory of the civil war, and pushing them “forward” toward the light. The Bolshevik discourse invested the enemy with symbolic attributes of its own. The rich notion of the “bourgeois” that emerges from the Bolshevik poetics is schematically represented in diagram . With the entrenchment of class language in the universities, the representation of student groups became exclusionary. A field of semantic differences opened up, articulated along the proletarian-bourgeois axis. In a piece with a typical title, “Class Disparagements,” a Bolshevik student described the Petrograd State University student body as a mixture of the old with the new. “In the corridor, near the lecture rooms,



              “               ” METONYMIES

bourgeois M E T A P H O R S

spectacles

greatcoat

Gaudeamus

intelligent

White Army soldier

regular student Note: diagonal lines = metonymic relation; vertical lines = metaphoric relation

 . Bolshevik poetics of the bourgeois.

stood a heterogeneous crowd of students. The eye met suit-uniforms, women’s hats with flowers, demi-veils, on occasion short sheepskin coats, army coats, shabby winter clothes, quilted jackets.” The same source portrayed the workers’ faculty as a “bubbling volcano covered by ragged coats as well as an entirely different sort of clothing, ranging from English trophies brought back by workers’ faculty students from battles with the White armies, to loose peasant blouses.” Another eyewitness, who had studied in the workers’ faculty, claimed he saw in his student days, “Red Army soldiers . . . yesterday with a rifle, today with a book, standing shoulder to shoulder with workers coming straight from the factory.” A student who had studied in Petrograd added to these descriptions of student clothing some chronological details: “From  to  students on crutches in army coats passed by. . . . After the first major influx of new people in , workers’ faculty and Komsomol students came in and the corridors witnessed a change: army coats, quilted jackets, colorful peasant jerseys, tattered student jackets that had seen better days have all suddenly appeared.”³³ Proletarian students were depicted as very different from the “semiintelligentsia: prim young ladies with high coiffures and gallant gentlemen 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

seeking a matriculation degree and a medal.” The latter were otherwise referred to as both “bourgeois kids” and “student colleagues and mesdemoiselles who wore new peaked caps, ties, gloves, little hats, pince-nezs.” Associated with the retrograde gymnasium were “polished buttons, loop-fastened jackets”; these contrasted with the workers’ faculty’s “metal buttons” and “proletarian shirts.” The white fabric lining the parkas of the well-to-do earned them the pejorative tag “belinened” (belopodkladochniki); the color of the lining was, of course, equated with the White political persuasion. One of the students relegated to this category claimed that “our waistcoats were not lined with white silk at all, though we did have coats chosen to look like guard officers. Rather, the nickname came to identify those students whose hair was not unkempt, and whose parkas were not threadbare.” But such complaints were to no avail—cultural stereotypes played too important a role to be reexamined.³⁴ Bolshevik students outlined this symbolic war. “The so-called heterodox (inakomysliaschie) cling to university traditions which are in opposition to the new spirit of the proletarian student body. As an emblem of science, which, they have repeatedly claimed, has nothing to do with politics, the old students wear student jackets or, if those are unavailable, an admiral’s hat with a blue brim.” These “truly academic symbols” were counterpoised to “the army coat, leather jacket, and cap” worn by the workers’ faculty students recently demobilized from the Red Army. A Bolshevik student reported overhearing some “well-bred students from idle classes make the following comments: ‘Why do they grant admission to these Red beasts? If they want to reduce the country to a barbarous condition they hardly need scholarship—coercion alone will do. There is no place for those in our shrine of science!’” The regular students supposedly called workers’ faculty students “kitchen-help kids [kukharkiny deti], who smell like shit” and “Soviet playboys” on account of their “political submissiveness.” Fighting back, the workers’ faculty students described their critics as “bourgeois intelligentsia” and interpreted their quest for intellectual and administrative autonomy as, at best, typical intelligentsia anticollectivism and, at worst, an exclusivism directed against the proletariat.³⁵ The Bolsheviks elaborated a set of anti-academic symbols to counter the symbols of a university life characterized by intellectual autonomy. What the liberals construed as concern for academic standards and university freedom was branded elitism and snobbery. The originally denigrating epithet 

              “               ”

“kitchen-help kids” was appropriated and, together with “children of the muzhiks,” came to denote the now honorable social origins of the new intelligentsia.³⁶ No better example of the delegitimation of the life of the mind can be cited than the pejorative connotation acquired by such terms as “old intelligentsia” and, even worse, “intelligenshchina.” In the mouth of the Bolsheviks, “intelligentsia” was associated increasingly with “soft,” “liberal,” and “vacillating” attitudes and with a total absence of proletarian “toughmindedness.” How distant from the exhortations with which the SR activists urged the Communist students to appreciate the student intelligentsia, “so sparse and so precious.” In one case a Bolshevik author ventured to describe the worker-student type as “not intelligent” (neintelligentnyi), relying on the adverse connotation of “intelligence” in the Bolshevik discourse; this was a human faculty divorced from labor and thus decadent.³⁷ On the other hand, “intelligentsia” could be imbued with a positive meaning if it clearly had originated in the proletariat. In the words of the central organ of the workers’ faculties, “We do not produce a non-class, above-class, or between-class intelligentsia but a workers’ intelligentsia. In the workers’ faculties our intelligentsia is made out of the fourth estate—the sans-culottes!”³⁸ Just as the Bolsheviks ousted the “clean-handed student” who philosophized instead of working, in favor of the student in the workers’ faculty, so they substituted for “Gaudeamus” (the traditional, intelligentsia student hymn) the proletarian “Internationale.”³⁹ The Gaudeamus was divorced from its association with student radicalism and defiance of tsarism and turned into a symbol of petit bourgeois reaction.⁴⁰ Traditional symbols of academic radicalism became, through the prism of the Bolshevik language, tokens of political reaction. While a workers’ faculty student held fast to revolutionary songs and commemorated prominent Communist figures, a regular student was said to celebrate the birthdays of dubious heroes such as Tolstoy and Nikolai Mikhailovskii and to whistle outdated university melodies. Forms of address were transformed into a battlefield: to replace terms such as “student” or “professor” or “colleague,” workers’ faculties introduced the term “comrade” (tovarish) into the university. The deputy head of Soviet education, Pokrovskii, proclaimed that being addressed as “professor” shocked him, whereas he was pleased to hear others address him as “comrade.”⁴¹ The celebration of “Tat’iana’s Name Day” (Tatianin Den’), identified as a bourgeois student festivity, was officially replaced in  by a new “Red Student Day.” A student periodical explained that in  the minister of edu

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

cation, Shuvalov, had postponed the opening of Moscow University until the day of Tat’iana, his mother’s name day, which fell on January . The periodical commented: “It is stupid and ridiculous to celebrate the gentry idea of a university, particularly since White students were fond of this event.” February  was to become the occasion for the Bolshevik academic festivity, chosen to commemorate the “revolutionary students’ head-on attack on tsarism on that date in .” Other days of commemoration were similarly contested. While organized protests against political arrests and demands for the improvement of student prisoners’ living conditions had functioned as rallying points for the old student body, the proletarian students expressed their own political attitudes around events such as the May  celebrations and demonstrations of class protest, the events surrounding the affair of the “Kerzon note” being one of the better remembered among them.⁴² Contemporary student verse and iconography also worked to disseminate class symbols. Numerous poems and drawings portrayed the university as an arena of class struggle. Published in , Shenkman’s “Proletarian in a University” is a good introduction to official student poetry: Kto uchit’sia nynche stal v vysshei shkole Proletarii ot stanka Paren’ s polia Choby v etom im pomoch’ Vlast’ sovetov, Set’ rabochikh sozdala Fakul’tetov Po poliam, zavodam klich: Ei rebiata! Na uchebu vykhodi Shkola vziata! Bel-professor, bel-student Zlo smeialis’—ne za delo za svoe Vy mol vzialis’ Chtob nauku prevzoiti Teti, diadi Nado vo kakoi imet’ Lob—v sem piadei



              “               ” Nado let piatok-drugoi Ryt’sia v knizhkakh Proteret’ desiatka tri Dyr v shtanishkakh. No nashlisia smel’chaki— Pedagogi. S rabfakami poshli Po doroge. Na nauki nalegli Grud’iu, lbami, Zakhrustel granit nauk Pod zubami. V rezul’tate tekh trudov Ne naprasnykh Na zavody VUZ poshlet Spetsov krasnykh. Razol’et po derevniam Volny sveta I proslavit na ves’ mir Vlast’ Soveta.⁴³ Who is studying these days / in our universities? / A proletarian from the bench, / A lad from the field. / To help them there / The Soviet power / Created a net of Workers’ faculties. / Factories and fields ring out: / Hey there, fellows! / Go to study, / The school is ours! / The White professor, the White student / Laughed like dandies. / “You have to take up a task / Way beyond you. / Look to master scholarship, / Uncles, aunties, / Here is the forehead / You have to have—wide and serious / Got to spend five years at least / Digging deep in books. / Got to rub holes thirty times / In your trousers.” / But we found some brave ones— / Ped-a-go-gues, / We got them to join their hands with / Workers’ faculty students. / Well, they fell on their learning, / With their chests and their foreheads tough, / And the hard tough stone of science / Crumbled under their feet. / As a result of their labors, / Far from futile, / The factory will get fresh / Red specialists, / They will spread over the villages / Waves of light, / And glorify to all the world / Soviet Power.

Set to the tune of a popular Russian song, Shenkman’s poem described a miraculous change: workers and peasants conquered the university, thwarting bourgeois resistance. 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

Poems educated students about proper proletarian behavior and appearance. The general message was that class identity could be inferred from semiotic attributes such as dress and manner of speech. Potopaev, in his poem “In the Workers’ Faculty,” boasted that he did not need more than one glance to tell what social class a student belongs to. Generally praising the proletarian makeup of his collective, Potopaev also detected a few class aliens who had wormed their way in: Pytlivo smotrel Ia v kazhdoe litso. V glazakh utomlennykh i bodrykh, v miagkikh chertakh i khudoshchavo. Tonkikh i szhatykh liniiakh ia ugadyval raznykh liudei, Byli rabochie, byli te, chto blizki im i byli edinitsy chuzhikh Nashe zdanie—nash kollektiv! Na nashikh znamenakh dolzhny byt’ emblemy industrii! Zhelezo prochistit put’! Na granite postroim my bashniu, o kotoroi pel rabochii Poet Gastev. Curiously I inspected every face, / Eyes weary but bright, features soft and lean. / There were workers, those close to them, and aliens as well. / Our group! Our collective! / The emblems of industry must be inscribed on our banners! / Iron will pave our way! / On granite we will build the tower, / Of which sang the worker-poet Gastev.⁴⁴

Accompanying the poem were illustrations of industrial chimneys—a symbol of the proletarian (male/metal) vigor leading the way and demolishing the old intelligentsia. Hammers, sickles, chimneys, and agricultural fields were the symbols chosen by the workers’ faculty students. All academic symbols were systematically avoided. Glancing at the iconography alone we might think we were dealing with publications geared toward workers or peasants (see figure ). In the early s, frontispieces of “worker-student periodicals” ignore the “student” component of the title and depict only the attributes of the working class (see figure ). A glance at the printed imagery in A Memoir of a White-Lining Student, published outside Russia, immediately reveals what was missing in Bolshevik student iconography. Here we see all that the Bolsheviks had renounced: an officer’s hat lying on a book, for example (see figure ). Only toward the 

              “               ”

 . Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. .

 . Rabochii student, no. , front page.



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

middle of the decade did academic images stage a modest comeback. The cover of one Siberian periodical audaciously drops the factory from the backdrop and returns to the traditional academic architectural types of university buildings, duly encircled, of course, by a sickle, a hammer, and a shining sun (see figure ). Some symbols of knowledge—books, utensils, and sun—now appear in isolation, leaving out almost all proletarian insignia (see figure ). That worker symbols could appear alone in student iconography but peasant symbols could not tells us that the peasant always took a back seat to the worker in these settings. The  vignette depicting a sheaf of wheat and a sickle is a rare counterexample reflecting the Party’s brief pro-peasant policy of the mid-s (see figure ). The numerous portraits of black-

 . Pamiati russkogo studenchestva (Paris, ), p. .

 . Kuznetsy griadushchego, no.  (), front page.

 . Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (–), p. .



              “               ”

smiths in academic periodicals corroborate Victoria Bonnell’s argument that the image of the male blacksmith became part and parcel of Bolshevik visual propaganda operating as a virtual icon (see figure ). The Red Army veteran was another frequent hero of student drawings and verse. “Had I been a painter,” one student wrote, “I would have painted a student of the workers’ faculty in no other way but as a man with a rifle or hammer in one hand and a book in the other.” A student emblem in which rifle with a bayonet is the support for a Communist flag with sickle and hammer brings his desire to life (see figure ).⁴⁵ In his  poem, Gurin could not decide whether the humming of the university corridors reminded him more of military barracks or of factories: Vot gudiat glukhii korridory Universitetskikh sten Eto my sverlim nauki gory, My gotovim kadry novykh smen. Ne k dvortsu poidem my—k chernoi khate. Chtob zazhech’ slepye ugolki, Chtob spaiat’ v stal’nom rukopozhatii Traktory i zvonkie stanki, Esli zh snova vrazheskie strely, Elsi doletit ikh svist, Vnov’ voz’metsia za vintovku smelo Bitvami kreshchennyi rabfakovets! Pust’ lisheniia—my ne smenim vekh! I zvenit na disputakh i sporakh V universitetskhikh koridorakh Nash goriachii proletarskii smekh.⁴⁶ And now in muffled corridors / University walls hum. / This is us, we are drilling through / the walls of scholarship, / Preparing new cadres, new men. / We will go not to the palace, but to the hovel, / To light up the corners blind and dark, / To unite in an iron handshake / Tractors and resonating workers’ benches stark. / Should the barbs of the enemy, / Once more whistle through the air, / Again he will courageously lift his rifle, / The faculty student baptized by war! / No matter how deprived, we will not change our mark, / And may our disputes and arguments resound, / Through the halls of the university, / With proletarian laughter, warm and loud. 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

 . Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. .

 . Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. .

 . Student-rabochii, nos. – (), p. . 

              “               ”

Gurin compared the proletarian acquisition of knowledge to a military conquest. The “drilling” he describes is another sexual metaphor in the style reminiscent of Gredeskul’s rape of the old intelligentsia. Eschatological representations of progression from ignorance to knowledge abounded in student poetics. The motif of a struggle with darkness was central to Chudinov’s “Student-Worker”: Khochu i uchit’sia i verit’ Chto blizok torzhestvennyi chas Chto nauka nevezhestvo smenit I vrazumit trudiashchiisia klass.⁴⁷ I want to study and believe / That the victorious hour is near, / That scholarship will rout ignorance, / And that the working class will become enlightened.

The attainment of enlightenment, tantamount to the attainment of “class consciousness,” was usually represented by a sun: I blizok solntsa— razuma torzhestvennyi voskhod! Khvala trudu! Tovarishchi, vpered! Pust’ oblegchit nam zhizn’ poznania svet! Da zdravstvuet rabochii fakul’tet!⁴⁸ The triumphant rise of the sun— / the mind—is near! / Praise be to toil! Comrades, forward! / Let the light of knowledge come to life! / Long live the workers’ faculty!

Iconography did not lag behind poetry. A Roman soldier, another recurrent image in the student journals, could have served as an illustration to the two poems above. The legionnaire stands on a stack of books in a firm yet contemplative pose. The sun glows behind him, suggesting that the conquest of knowledge has just been completed (see figure ). On another occasion, a Roman bust, basking in the sun of knowledge, holds a book on which is inscribed the phrase “knowledge gives power and glory.” Many emblems and drawings depicted the sun shining above factories, illuminating the blacksmith’s path, or rising above a worker and a peasant clasping hands (see figure ). The emancipating effect light could have was particularly striking in an emblem that might as well be a theatrical set designed by an expressionist. 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

 . Iunnyi kommunist, nos. – (), front page.

 . Student revoliutsii, no.  (), p. . 

              “               ”

 . Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. .

 . Kuznetsy griadushchego, no.  (), p. .

Exuding an almost mystical quality, the emblem is a composition of starkly contrasting black and white; depicted are two figures, or rather a shadow hovering behind the bright silhouette of a figure striding forward. A hunched, stooping form, the shadow signifies the exploited and miserable worker who remains in darkness; the illuminated, upright figure has been enlightened and advances toward a promised emancipation (see figure ). Another stock symbol of knowledge was an open book. Very often it appeared alongside silhouettes of factories, in the hands of worker students, or woven into the attributes of a worker, or into those of a worker and a peasant (see figure ). Specifically Communistic images were late arrivals in Soviet iconography. In the early s they were almost always combined with attributes of the proletariat. The worldwide appeal of the Revolution is alluded to in an emblem that includes a globe shot through with the arrow of proletarian consciousness. An industrial city is in the background (see figure ). A somewhat unusual  frontispiece depicts a blacksmith and a peasant at the foot of the temple of knowledge. Marx’s face, transformed to resemble that of a deity, is at the head of the stairs. The message is that those proletarians who desired emancipation could achieve it by reading the book of Marxist knowledge, provided by the Party, symbolized by the star (see figure ). 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

 . Student revoliutsii, no.  (), p. .

 . Rabfakovets, no.  (), front page. 

              “               ”

In the late s, the new intelligentsia was proclaimed to have been forged out of its constitutive, proletarian materials. At this time, student poems shifted their focus from the New Man’s proletarian origins to the synthesis of work and thought in his persona. In Vikhirev’s “The Mind,” the hands of the student hero were lent greater strength by his brains: Zver’ prosto myslit o sebe A mozhet byt’ sovsem ne myslit Pokornyi vekovoi sud’be, On delaet riskovyi vysled A u menia luchistyi um I strast’ zheleznaia k nauke Na um prikhodit mnogo dum, Ot etikh dum krepchaiut ruki.⁴⁹ The animal thinks simply of itself, / If it thinks at all; / Obedient to its unchanging fate, / It stalks its prey, treading dangerously, / But I have a bright and shining mind, / And iron passion to learn; / Many thoughts come to my mind, / And from them my arms are strengthened.

The connection between knowledge and physical strength is symbolized also in drawings depicting the human mind connected to wheels (see figure ). As every act was motivated by thought and every thought was geared toward an act, so every wheel was turned by a mind and every mind was set in motion by a wheel. Thus was celebrated the unity of mental and manual labor.

The Emergence of Class-Based Admissions The Bolsheviks initiated the proletarianization of the student body in earnest only in . On the most mundane level, only the end of military hostilities could release sufficient resources to permit the Party to intervene in internal university affairs. But on a deeper plane, an attitudinal shift was also at work. With the inauguration of NEP the Party had to confront the necessity of social intervention in order to bring about classless society. If the Party wanted to bring worthy citizens to the light, it had to “counter spontaneity” and design strategies that would give shape to the body politic. During the Civil War, the Bolsheviks bifurcated society; it was a question of “those who are with us versus those who are against us.” But with peace, gray areas appeared.



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

 . Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. .

Grigorii Vinokur, a contemporary language theorist, complained that “during War Communism we recognized only one social category within our camp—the ‘good.’ ‘Evil’ was consigned strictly to the enemy camp. But then came NEP, injecting evil into the good . . . and disrupting all. No longer waging an open war against each other, good and evil coexist today within the same collective.”⁵⁰ Class analysts observed with sadness that NEP economics produced a wide spectrum of “classes,” “class-groupings,” and “class layers.” Now that social groups with double faces, partially friend and partially foe, were drawn into the orbit of Soviet power, Narkompros felt compelled to develop a sophisticated class policy that would determine which classes belonged to the proletarian university and which did not. The anxiety that surrounded this project was augmented by the conviction that the new bourgeoisie wanted to commandeer higher education.⁵¹ The Bolsheviks were unanimous in their belief that liberal enrollment policies would prolong the upper-class monopoly on education. Shvedov, a highly placed Narkompros official, maintained that the strict regulation of admissions was the only way to root out the bourgeoisie. “Spontaneity is the scourge of the university enrollment. Anarchy in admissions has to be rooted out. . . . Less arbitrariness, less haphazardness, more organized intervention, more planning—that is what we need.”⁵² Proletarianization became the order of the day. The exact meaning of “proletarianization,” however, was far from clear. A sociological interpretation of the term “proletariat,” Krupskaia argued, would only restructure class configurations in the Soviet Union, whereas the real task was the construction of a classless society.



              “               ” Universities have to be a weapon of proletarian influence on all layers of society. Education should not be a privilege. . . . Which students should be preferred? Clearly, those imbued with a class consciousness who strive to destroy the bourgeois order and understand the tasks necessary for the building of Soviet Russia. It goes without saying that it is easier to find such students among the proletariat. This is the reason behind admitting the proletarian class.⁵³

But who were these “proletarians” and where were they to be found? Those who did not fill the bill were easier to identify. These were first and foremost those who belonged to the ruling classes of the old regime—the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the clergy—as well as the new NEP bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. But what of this hard-to-describe “proletariat”? The simplest definition equated “proletarian” with a propertyless “manual laborer.” But the Bolsheviks were aware that such a definition would render the country in which they carried out the first proletarian revolution insufficiently proletarian, since manual laborers were scarce. The majority of the population of the Soviet Union of the s was described as peasants, so there was a discussion about whether or not “peasants” were “proletarians”—of sorts. Some Bolshevik social scientists believed that the claim could be made for at least a part of the rural population. Little, they claimed, distinguished workers who sold their labor in the cities from landless agricultural laborers (batraki) who did the same in the countryside. Eventually, a compound definition was arrived at—it seemed that some peasants, and not only industrial workers, deserved the honorable title of proletarian. Moreover, the peasantry, examined in its own right, was a complex entity that included the “poor peasants” (bedniaki), the “middling peasants” (seredniaki), and the peasant-exploiters (kulaki). The last category was made up of those who took advantage of agricultural laborers in the villages, and those were clearly not proletarians. But the poor and middle peasants were proletarian to the extent that they lived off their own work. This meant that most peasants deserved some of the benefits of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, though they could claim them only after the needs of the true workers had been satisfied. The apparent complexity and variation within the working class also rendered very difficult the proper identification of a class-messiah. Should workers employed in large industrial factories and those employed in small shops be treated in the same way? Were the latter perhaps a Menshevik constituency 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

and thus not real proletarians? “It is not enough just to be a worker,” stated Liadov, the rector of Sverdlov Communist University. “It is equally important to contribute to the work of training the class in your place of work. The embryo of proletarian class consciousness is forged in a large factory, in a large shop; it cannot arise if one works in a small shop.” Another authority on proletarian education, Gessen, voiced a similar appreciation of workers in large enterprises: “When we consider the ‘anatomy’ and ‘physiology’ of the social composition of university students we can see that the percentage of pure industrial workers there, that is metal, mines, textile, railroad, and water workers, is not high enough.” The university was faced not only with the task of “enlarging the cadres of workers, but of specifically promoting industrial workers. This orientation will no doubt enhance the sociopolitical and Party status of the new students, measuring this achievement, of course, not by the number and quality of the books they read but by the Party and political ripeness they display.”⁵⁴ Both officials ultimately resorted to a purely political judgment. Gessen speculated as to which workers would make the best students: “Those workers boiled in the pot of the Civil War and of revolutionary construction will very quickly accept the necessary elements of sociopolitical preparation.” Those who applied to Bolshevik universities were ideally to have had not only three years of experience in a large factory but also at least three years of untarnished Party service.⁵⁵ Thus the term “proletariat” was a bit like nesting Russian dolls, each piece smaller and more refined than the preceding one, the final doll not to be revealed until Communism had been realized. In the final account, sociological criteria were determined by eschatological criteria—to call a student a “worker” meant not simply the appreciation of a social label but the attribution of a Communist consciousness. In  Liadov condensed his suggestions regarding university proletarianization into a series of brief theses, which he submitted to students for evaluation. His proposals elicited the following sorts of responses: () Only workers should enroll in the university. There should be no discrimination of the scale of their industrial employers, since preferences would create privileged groups within the working class. () Peasants should be admitted to Communist universities if they were either active in the Civil War, belonged to national minorities, or were truly agricultural laborers. Some students proposed a fixed ratio of workers to peasants ( percent workers,  percent peasants;  percent workers,  percent peasants; and so on). () It is 

              “               ”

important to administer a more critical policy toward ex-members of other parties demanding at least five years of loyal service to Bolshevism. () The basic requirement of industrial work experience should be raised from three to five years. () The requirement of an “untarnished Party record” should be reinterpreted. Some students suggested the substitution of “never convicted by a Party trial” for the word “untarnished”; others proposed that only three years of active Party work be required. Whatever the specifics of the students’ proposals, it is noteworthy that both Liadov and his students at Sverdlov Party University shared the same parameters of discussion—class discourse—and limited their debates to details within the discrete topic.⁵⁶ The workers’ faculties, along with the Communist universities, inspired many of the proletarianization measures that would later be implemented by Narkompros. More flexible than the universities in their admissions procedures, the workers’ facilities were better able to respond to the imperatives of Bolshevik social engineering. Shvedov believed that these schools were a crucible where perfect Communists were produced by taking “worker-peasant raw materials” and inculcating them with a “proletarian consciousness.” He went on to note that “to improve the quality of the end result, the workers’ faculties need to remove defective goods during the first stage of refinement (the first and second semesters), then meticulously to sort out the semifinished product (the third and fourth semesters) and finally rigorously to inspect the final product (last year).”⁵⁷ Basic admissions requirements were minimal. Accepted for consideration were all persons between eighteen and thirty years of age who commanded the four basic operations of arithmetic in whole numbers, who could express themselves satisfactorily in speech and writing, and who possessed political knowledge roughly equivalent to the elementary program in political literacy. Applicants were required to have a certain “work experience” in manual labor. Workers and peasants who were severed from physical labor due to the Red Army military draft were eligible for the workers’ faculty. Peasants who belonged to the village poor and who tilled the land without exploiting others were also accepted. Upon satisfactorily answering the workers’ faculty’s questionnaire, the applicant was provided by the recommending organization with a “dispatch” (komandirovka), signed by the chairman or secretary and bearing the seal of the organization. If the applicant was found to have made any false statements in his application, he and his endorsers were held equally responsible.⁵⁸ 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

Quotas for the workers’ faculty were set according to the density of worker population in the various provinces. The allocation system established six gradations of labor density. Those provinces with a minimum of fifty thousand organized workers (that is, registered in trade unions) were ranked first; those with forty thousand, second; down to the provinces ranked last with fewer than ten thousand workers. In densely industrialized provinces, up to  percent of the total dispatches to workers’ faculties were issued by trade unions. In provinces where the peasantry predominated, their share dropped to  percent; the Party and village executive committees were responsible for filling the remaining quotas. Suspecting the class purity of the rural population, Narkompros took measures to ensure that the peasants sent to the workers’ faculties were “politically reliable.” The Second Workers’ Faculty Conference clarified that these should be “peasants who have been approved by local Party or Komsomol organizations.” Still, the publicist Sosnovskaia, uncomfortable with peasant enrollment, reminded her readers that the “workers’ faculty was created for workers” and insisted that at least one half of its students should come from the working class.⁵⁹ In  Narkompros awarded trade unions more than twice as many vacancies in Petrograd workers’ faculties than did the Party and the Komsomol combined. This indicated that the old capital was considered an industrial center where skilled workers constituted the most important group. Further bias in favor of heavy industrial unions may be gleaned from the distribution of vacancies for different types of trade unions. A ratio of :: was recorded between the admissions quotas of industrial unions, semi-industrial unions, and nonindustrial unions. This tripartite separation bespoke the Bolshevik belief that manual workers in metallurgy, textiles, and mining were the most proletarian of proletarians.⁶⁰ Local authorities in Siberia, an area less industrialized and so less reliable, were not entrusted with staffing the workers’ faculties. In explaining that “workers have to make their way to Siberian workers’ faculties from European Russia, dispatched eastward by Red Army agencies, because in Siberia the industrial proletariat is scarce,” a local administrator brought the contrast between Petrograd and Siberia into sharp relief. While the former capital was considered the epicenter of the Revolution and a bastion of the conscious working class, Siberia was considered a problematic territory only recently released from White control. Loyal proletarians, just demobilized 

              “               ”

from the Red Army, might be sent to the region to improve it. Class consciousness was a commodity to be distributed, and by directing the deployment of recent graduates across the country, the central government was attempting to balance out regional disequilibrium. As one moved east, from Petrograd to Tomsk and then to Irkutsk, Bolshevik anxiety regarding the class composition of the region rose, and “pure workers” were replaced in admissions by surrogates. In Tomsk the surrogate workers were “toiling peasants” and in Irkutsk (when even these did not abound) they were Communists of any social origin.⁶¹ The mid-s debate over the status of workers’ faculties revealed a tension within the Soviet government over what NEP meant for education. Khodorovskii, the head of the higher education section of Narkompros, advocated the normalization of the educational structure and the gradual abolition of workers’ faculties and other ad hoc institutions. He viewed the workers’ faculties, which had been created during the Civil War, as a radical and exclusivist proletarian institution, incompatible with NEP and its spirit of class compromise. Khodorovskii maintained that it was time to allow high schools to prepare university applicants—a step that would mean not the abdication of class policies but their rationalization. Vikhirev, the head of the Narkompros workers’ faculty department, vehemently contested such arguments. According to Vikhirev NEP itself was a transient and temporary solution to the problems faced by the Revolution. The workers’ faculty ought to be seen as the bud of the genuine proletarian educational institution of the future. High schools, by contrast, were hopeless. They mainly served petit bourgeois elements (children of employees, artisans, merchants, industrialists, and so on), and in the best of cases, a few workers’ children who “entered a non-productivist environment,” were “engulfed by the petite bourgeoisie” and could not help but “degenerate.” The high schools were construed by Vikhirev as a bastion of the intelligentsia, which could not be reformed but only circumvented by an array of proletarian institutions.⁶² Supported by the Party, the line favoring the workers’ faculty prevailed and secondary schools were discredited as “bourgeois institutions” for the duration of NEP. High school graduates had very little chance of enrolling in universities. When they did, they were obliged to pay tuition to offset the advantages the Party feared the bourgeoisie was gaining from NEP. The children of Professor Konchalovskii, for example, completed their studies in reg-



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

ular secondary schools only to find the doors of higher education closed to them. Konchalovskii, a renowned historian, wrote in despair to his sister in , “Vania and Natasha were purposefully failed in their university entrance exams. Universities these days are open only to the Communists. Our children are declassed. My children study on their own at home. . . . I see no hope for them except outside of Russia.” It was not unusual for the children of persons with this sort of background to undertake manual tasks for a period of time and then claim to be “workers” in order to gain admission to a university.⁶³ University admissions were modeled on the admissions practices developed in the workers’ faculty. Already in  student Communists believed that, “if higher education is to be brought into tune with the general revolutionarysocialist tendencies of the proletariat, the system of university enrollment has to be altered. . . . Higher education should be reserved for the toilers. These quotas should be introduced openly.”⁶⁴ In this spirit, Narkompros instructed universities to abide strictly by the class principle in making admissions decisions, recognizing the preeminent right of toilers and their children to become students. Narkompros praised the workers’ faculties’ achievements in proletarianization and set as a target a decrease in the number of those who were not physical laborers to a mere  percent of the student body.⁶⁵ In  the system of “dispatches”—going hand in hand with the “quota system” (razverstka)—was extended from workers’ faculties to all institutions of higher education. All decisions regarding the recommending and selecting of candidates for university admissions were now in the hands of the official Soviet agencies. Narkompros made an effort to dictate in advance the exact number of students that might be selected by each agency. Independent, individual application to universities was seriously curtailed. On the state level, dispatching was carried out by the regional and district administrations. The soviets in the cities and the executive committees in the countryside were responsible for sending worthy applicants to universities. The quota system was accompanied by a Party-sponsored recruitment campaign organized by the provincial district committees. The applications had to include records of the applicant’s social position, Party activities, career development, and educational background. In order to sustain the fairly elaborate admissions administration system (and to secure Moscow’s control over the process) Narkompros formed a network of university admissions commissions.⁶⁶



              “               ”

The official priorities in engineering a student body were revealed in the sixteen ranked criteria for admissions (workers’ faculty graduates were automatically accommodated): . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Party members Komsomol members workers and workers’ children the poorest peasantry children of poor peasants with certificates from village Party cells or executive committees active participants in the Civil War who served in active formations and took part in battles children of praiseworthy revolutionaries children of Communists, administrators, commissars, medical workers, and the political apparatus of the Red Army and the fleet children of invalids who served in the Red Army and the fleet members of trade unions and their children children of professors children of staff of educational institutions schoolteachers and their children orphans in state-run orphanages individuals recommended by Party organizations individuals recommended by narkoms [Soviet equivalent of ministries] and their provincial divisions

The essentials of the s class ladder were clear: Communists came first, followed by proletarians; the intelligentsia came last.⁶⁷ As of  Narkompros put into effect a national scheme for dividing admissions quotas between the various dispatching organizations. About  percent of the quotas were assigned to the trade unions (VTsSPS),  percent to the Party, and the rest of the quotas were distributed among the village executive committees, the army, and the national narkoms. (Only  percent of all students admitted to Soviet universities came through free competitive admissions. By and large these were high school graduates identified with the “bourgeois intelligentsia.”) Each administrative organ was responsible for the class credentials of the individuals it dispatched. Individual applicants had to prove their social position through a Party, professional, or soviet organization.⁶⁸ It took time to achieve uniformity in university admissions procedures



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

across the country. The  report of the admissions commission established by the Technological Institute illuminates some of the initial uncertainties in the implementation of Narkompros instructions in Petrograd. “After we had identified the academically prepared applicants we sorted them out on the basis of class. . . . Then all applicants were invited to fill out a questionnaire. Whenever the information was suspect or incomplete the applicant was called in to remedy the gaps.” The dispatch system “left a lot to be desired.” Since no organization proved capable of fulfilling its quota, the Petrograd Soviet of Professional Unions began to issue dispatches to anyone who could show a membership card from any professional union. “The end result was a flood of poor quality trade union applicants at the expense of other organizations.” It was eventually decided to ignore dispatches and to assess the class profile of the applicants on the basis of questionnaires alone. “First we tracked down workers and workers’ children and enrolled them en masse without further ado.” Second came the peasants and their children and last came children of small artisans, employees, and other individuals “of doubtlessly proletarian origin.”⁶⁹ A Petrograd State University rector’s report was likewise shot through with confusion regarding the meaning of class discrimination in admissions: What is the evidence in birth certificates and questionnaires that could bar one’s way to the university? Members of the local admissions commission do as they please and their personal discretion is hardly faultless! Our admissions commission worked under terrible conditions, most often staffed, as it were, by a single Komsomol representative—typically a university student who refused entrance to children of former honorary citizens, court counselors, state counselors, gymnasium directors, and so forth.⁷⁰

The rector was clearly unhappy about the rigor of the class criteria and the student Party organization’s control over the interpretation of class in admissions. Yet, no matter how grotesque the literal implementation of Narkompros directives was in these early years, the reports of the Petrograd local admissions commissions show that the principle of proletarianization became a fundamental guideline in university admissions. The local Narkompros department concluded by stating: “The first campaign to take up a concrete goal—the seizure of higher education by the proletariat—the  admissions campaign proved to have been worthwhile.”⁷¹ The transition from War Communism to NEP was less evident in Siberia



              “               ”

because of its peripheral status and its occupation by the Whites during the Civil War. The Siberian branch of Narkompros confessed in  that “as late as  we admitted large numbers of completely unacceptable elements, among them even some former Kolchak officers.” By , however, Tomsk admissions commissions were already on “class alert.” When, in August of that year, the local branch of Narkompros instructed Tomsk Technological Institute to enroll en bloc students from the Irkutsk Polytechnical Institute, recently reorganized and downgraded to technicum status, the head of admissions in the institute objected that such a measure was at odds with his deep commitment to proletarianization: Documents and interviews with Irkutsk students revealed that twenty-one of them are unwelcome at our institute because of their class background, five can somehow be tolerated and only two are really wanted. You must realize that the Irkutsk Institute teemed with alien elements. A major trading center, Irkutsk has always been a source of attraction to merchants. Moreover, the city is currently populated by Kolchak soldiers who escaped to Kharbin and have recently been trickling back. In order not to disrupt the proletarianizing efforts which have just begun to make headway we beseech you to take all measures to prevent the mechanistic integration of Irkutsk students into our institute and to allow the local admissions commission to select them on a class basis.⁷²

Narkompros’s array of institutions for the rigorous screening of applicants not only introduced a proletarian bias into academic enrollments but created an institutional network that employed the language of class. The percolation into the dry administrative language of admissions commissions of phrases such as “formal knowledge” (opposed to the “informal knowledge” derived from what Gorkii called “the university of life”), “exemption from examination” (granted not to students with the best academic records but to proletarian applicants) and, most explicitly, “class rejects,” ushered the proletarianization agenda into higher education.

The Mechanism for Bestowing Class Identity Without a classificatory method that both was pragmatic and applied to concrete individuals, proletarianization could not take off. A blueprint by which the general characteristics of the “proletarian” might be translated into 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

meaningful, practical categories had to be designed and an entire language of class statistics had to be invented. Initially, Soviet universities employed statistical categories of imperial Russia. These fluctuated between the traditional language employed on estates and an alternative system that had been proposed by the modernizing bureaucrats. To take one example, in the radical epoch of  the social profile of students at Moscow University had been determined on the basis of occupation. The motley list of vocations included not only many free professions, reflecting their gradual legitimation and expansion in postreform Russia, but also the category “worker.” This method of student classification was anathema to the tsarist conservatives, for it threatened in the most direct manner the traditional estate ladder. Indeed, as the heyday of radicalism waned, the very students once divided up according to progressive groupings were being categorized again on the traditional estate basis: “nobles,” “civil servants,” “clergy,” “honorary citizens,” and “merchants.”⁷³ Although a broad redefinition of the social composition of the student body was not attempted during the Civil War an effort was made to introduce class into the language of academic statistics, at least in the Bolshevik Party schools. The  statistical report of Sverdlov Communist University allows a glimpse into how class categories were used in these years. The sponsor of the report, Vladimir Nevskii, divided the student body into five categories: “workers,” “peasants,” “free professionials,” “small property holders,” and “propertyless.”⁷⁴ Nevskii prided himself on the fact that “pure proletarians, largely qualified metal workers who lack any property and earn bread with personal labor . . . clearly predominate in the university.” But he also admitted that the university drew on the “backward layers of the proletariat”: textile workers, shop assistants, chancery workers, and tailors. The fluidity of the notion of the “proletariat” was glaring. In one place in the report Nevskii employed a division between “pure proletariat” and “backward proletariat,” while in another he referred to the “proletariat,” the “urban strata close to the proletariat,” and the “backward proletariat” almost interchangeably. Apparently Nevskii distinguished between the more specific category of “workers” and the umbrella category of “proletarians,” which during the Civil War fused together all social groups that supported Soviet Power. Indeed, the next issue discussed in the report was the students’ political affiliations, the options being “Communist,” “Communist sympathizer,” “nonpartisan,” and “member of other party.”⁷⁵ 

              “               ”

Nevskii claimed that since the Communist university was open to “workers and peasants of all political persuasions,” the growth in the number of Party members among the students reflected a process of worker and peasant conversion to Communism. Nevskii’s own evidence, however, suggested that the increase in the aggregate number of Communists might well have had a different explanation. His tables show that the “urban dwellers” (otherwise called “free professionals”) were accepted by the “worker-peasant university” in rising numbers, provided they were Party members. Their influx into the university was responsible for the rising share of Communists among the students. In other words, Communists became, in the semantics of Nevskii’s report, “proletarians” at least as often as proletarians became Communists. This brief glance at the civil war Bolshevik laboratory of social categories permits us to follow the genesis of class categories in use after . Although property ownership as an independent axis along which students were characterized was soon to disappear, the breakdown of the student body into “workers,” “peasants,” and “free professionals” (that last category soon to be replaced by “intelligentsia” and “employees”), so common in the s, was already discernible.⁷⁶ Unaware of the nascent class categories developed in the Communist universities, state universities at first clung to the traditional ways of classifying students. The social categories in use by imperial bureaucracy in the Tomsk State University immediately before the revolution were based on the estates “children of nobles and bureaucrats”; “clergy”; “children of honorary citizens and merchants”; “children of townspeople and of guild craftsmen [tsekhovye]”; “Cossacks and military men of lower rank”; “peasants”; and “non-natives [inogorodtsy].” The categories employed by the Sovietized administration immediately after the termination of the Civil War were not much different: “townspeople,” “peasants,” “nobles,” “Cossacks,” “honorary citizens,” and “people of various ranks” (raznochintsy). The only form innovation took was the occasional shift from estate to vocation encapsulated by the appearance of groupings such as “students,” “chancery workers,” “physical workers,” “technical workers,” “pedagogical workers,” and “mixed occupation.” The inertia in the use of categories was evident. Perhaps this was to be expected in a city controlled by the Whites for most of the Civil War. But Petrograd materials somewhat surprisingly tell a similar story. The  Petrograd Polytechnical Institute questionnaire asked not about the class position of the student, but about his former estate affiliation: Were 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

you a “noble”? a “peasant”? a “townsperson” (meshchanin)? Identifying yourself by class or occupation was not an option.⁷⁷ The concomitant implementation of personal data questionnaires by the Narkompros, however, indicated that an attempt to reassess the social nature of the student body was already under way. In  many universities instructed their students to submit to their departmental office completed personal questionnaires. No omissions would be tolerated. The accuracy of the data had to be attested to by two of the testifier’s classmates, who carried full responsibility for the information given. First-year students were warned that those who failed to submit the questionnaire in time were to be expelled from the universities. Students of advanced years who failed to comply were to forfeit government stipends. The administrative grip on the institute had obviously tightened. Poletika, a student in Petrograd at this time, recalled the endless registrations and reregistrations that took from one to two full days. “But even that did not suffice, and endless questionnaires were introduced reaching twenty to thirty questions on average.” The most crucial questions concerned the class origins and occupations of one’s parents and oneself, both before the revolution and during the various stages of the Civil War. One asked if the student had relatives abroad, how they were related, where they lived, and what they did. Afterward came the political questions about the student’s attitude toward Soviet Power, his political sympathies, and so on. Poletika declared: filling out the questionnaire was an art in itself. A careless attitude toward this task could have gruesome consequences: the professional committee or the Party cell of the university, collecting several questionnaires from the same student, carefully compared them, after which the student might be summoned and asked why, for example, in questionnaire number one he gave one answer whereas to a similar question in questionnaire number two he gave a different answer or refrained from answering altogether. If the answers did not match then the conclusion was that the student had something to hide. The most careful and farsighted students filled out two copies of each questionnaire and kept a standard summary of answers to all the questions. They repeated these answers in all the following questionnaires. I, as a student and, later, as an instructor, had to fill out about – questionnaires.⁷⁸

To study student questionnaires, special troikas were made up of representatives of the administration and loyal Party or Komsomol personnel. Based 

              “               ”

on their interrogation of the “suspected” students the troikas decided who was allowed to continue his studies and who did not belong in the proletarian university. The language of class made its way into the Soviet university statistics only gradually. The Narkompros classification of the Petrograd State University student body between  and  attested to the enormous birth pangs that accompanied the evolution of the Bolshevik method of student classification. The early melange of professional and estate categories ultimately gave way to a more or less stable class matrix (illustrated in table ). The fortunate availability of three independent classifications of the same  Petrograd State University student body by Narkompros, the Party, and a local newspaper neatly demonstrates the fact that student social identities were not just out there but had to be constructed (see table ). Since the object that the three statisticians were trying to capture was identical, whereas the pictured composition of the student body varied markedly, the differences between the three columns in table  below have to be accounted for in terms of the divergent approaches taken in analyzing the student body. Table 1 Social Composition of Students in the Petrograd State University, 1921–1924 1921–1922 sons of peasants

1922–1923

1,558

peasants

1923–1924 779

peasants and their children

449

merchants

361

merchants

15

clergy

327

clergy

20

clerks

735

Soviet employees

54

Soviet 1,788 employees and their children

workers

110

workers

93

workers and their children

lower-rank clerks

108

lower-rank clerks

55

idle persons

19

honorary citizens

592

honorary citizens

189

other professions

180

working population

152

townspeople

1,396

nobles

285

nobles

61

teachers

506

artisans

82

Totals

5,975

Source: TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. –.



2,245

436

2,873

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

Clearly, different statistical agencies guided by different yardsticks could portray the very same student body in radically inconsistent ways. Table  teaches us less about an objective social reality and more about the eye that was looking at it. The real variety of categories throws light on the complexity of the process through which the class categories considered requisite for proletarianization were hammered out. Not only was figuring out how many students belonged to certain social categories a vexing issue, the social labels themselves were a confusing subject. Were criteria to be established according to former estate membership? or relation to means of production? or income Table 2 Comparison of Three Classifications of the Students in Petrograd University, 1922 Peasants

Narkompros

Party

Leningradskaia pravda

779

603

689

Merchants (kuptsy)

15

20

16

Clergy

20

23

129

Soviet employees

54

30

47

93

80

28

189

87

—

Workers Honorary citizens Nobles

61

50

61

Lower-rank clerks

55

—

—

Artisans

82

—

—

152

—

—

Townspeople

—

570

595

Worker, peasant, and artisan children

—

50

—

Working intelligentsia

—

58

120

Working intelligentsia children

—

96

—

Children of former officers

—

2

66

Source of income unknown

—

350

—

Unaccounted for

—

—

959

Working population

Notes: Dashes indicate the failure of a given source to offer the corresponding category. There are several possible explanations for the discrepancies in the aggregate number of students between the three sources: () some sources used to give student numbers included the graduating ones, but others did not; () some sources listed all students enrolled, but others gave only those who actually attended classes; () some sources included workers’ faculty students in the general count, but others did not. Source: TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. –; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ; Petrogradskaia pravda, November , .



              “               ”

level? Debates raged on this topic. The Narkompros statistician apparently invested a considerable amount of effort in sorting out which classes stood behind the label “townspeople”—from a Marxist perspective a particularly opaque category. It is likely that the categories “artisans,” “clerks,” and “working population” appearing in the Narkompros study are the result of this labor. We should note that both the Party and the newspaper statisticians were less bold in this regard, relying simply on the old estate category. Another apparent translation of an estate category or an occupational category into a class category was the conversion of some “honorary citizens,” “employees,” “clerks,” and probably “nobles” into “working intelligentsia” in the Party source (note that the newspaper reporter makes the widest use of this category and the Narkompros statistician does not utilize it at all). As Soviet statistics developed later in the decade such discrepancies between statistical compilations disappeared. By reshuffling the administrative structure of higher education and its personnel, the new regime was finally able, in , to introduce class language fully into the universities.⁷⁹ Still, what classes there were and how class affiliation was to be determined remained issues subject to periodic reinterpretation. The official Narkompros Petrograd State University class statistics never froze into an immutable mold. Defined as “toiling peasantry” (–), the peasant category was later broken down into a number of subclasses, for example. The landless villagers were sometimes labeled “peasants,” at other times, “workers.” The intelligentsia, starting out as “petit bourgeois mental laborers” (until ), became “toiling intelligentsia” (–) and then finally lapsed into “wreckers” () (see chapter ). The argument that sets of data pertaining to class composition of the universities before and after the revolution were “incompatible” misses the mark. The Soviet regime did not simply ignore pre-revolutionary estate criteria. On the contrary, as shown by the transitory categories used in Tomsk and Petrograd in –, a very sophisticated scheme of categorization was developed, which translated estate labels into the language of class. The compatibility of estate and class categories was not treated as an issue of methodological complexity but as a question of political leverage. In theory, Narkompros administrative statistics were supposed to register the class affiliation of university applicants. In practice, however, the choice of class parameters shaped reality as much as it reflected reality. The indeterminacy of class affiliation and its openness to reinvention suggest that class was a 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

political not a sociological concept. Because individuals were open to various class readings, social identity was always contested. A student did not simply shed former estate nomination and emerge, tabula rasa, after the revolution; he carried forever the estate category of his birth. Whereas he might attempt to translate his estate nomination into a favorable class denomination, his detractors might well do their best to frame him as a class alien. In the early s “social origins” (sotsial’noe proishozhdenie) were the main criteria for class. As the revolution receded into the past, however, the Bolsheviks realized that class identities were in a constant process of change; some individuals were “degenerating” (razlozhilis’), whereas others were “moving close to the working class” (orabochilis’). To account for these perceived developments, the Bolshevik class analysts now distinguished between “social origins” and “social position” (sotsial’noe polozhenie), the latter category taking into account “current vocation” as well. From the mid–s, the central statistical bureau’s instructions to the dispatching organizations (the main agencies that conferred class identity on the academic applicants) were to give “current occupation” precedence over “social origins” in determining class identity. The detailed admissions reports prepared by the Siberian workers’ faculties in  allow us to trace the implementation of these regulations.⁸⁰ We have here a rare opportunity to learn which organizations bestowed which identities and how. The provincial executive committees and the village Komsomol were apparently the key organizations sponsoring “peasants.” In terms of vocation, the peasant column included “land tillers,” “agricultural workers,” “buttermakers,” “shepherds,” “medical assistants,” and “millers.” Thus most—but not all—of the “peasant” applicants matched the archetype of the Russian muzhik—an agricultural laborer tilling his own land. Although many peasants were “unprepared for studies,” the Tomsk admissions commission was reluctant to turn them down, thereby “killing the budding trust of the peasant in the educational system.” Still, the Bolsheviks feared that many organizations, eager to advance their men into higher education, were dispatching declassed peasants. The line separating a “peasant” from a “village intelligentsia” was often very thin. Since it was nearly impossible to enroll a village inhabitant who did nonphysical labor into the workers’ faculty, this or that aspect of his biography or occupation was interpreted so as to turn him from a “mental laborer” into a “toiling peasant.” Well aware of this practice, the Tomsk authorities noted the “inadequate class quality of the peasants in our workers’ faculty. The executive committees often sent village 

              “               ”

teachers or administrative personnel to fill up peasant quotas . . . betraying an ignorance of the most basic idea behind workers’ faculty.” An investigation team sent to Siberia by the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate noted that “the enrollment of alien elements has provoked dissatisfaction among the ranks of the students themselves, which they have expressed in wall newspapers.” The inspectors added that whereas students condemned the enrollment of undercover employees, they at the same time paradoxically “regretted the discrimination in enrollment against activists in the village Cultural Enlightenment Departments, village teachers and illiteracy liquidators.”⁸¹ The Party and the trade unions emerge as the organizations that primarily sponsored “workers” in their application to the workers’ faculties. The ratio of “workers” to “peasants” to “mental laborers” sent by the trade unions to the Irkutsk workers’ faculty, for example, was striking—::. This rigor in the enforcement of a strict proletarian line was, however, somewhat misleading. The character of the trade unions participating in academic enrollment— metal, railroad, mining, timber, textile, waterways, food, chemistry, communal education—suggests that most of the “workers” were sent by semiindustrial or employee organizations (hardly surprising since industry in Siberia was undeveloped and workshops abounded). The corresponding list of the applicants’ professions—turner, fitter, mechanic, miner, stoker, baker, printer, carpenter, shoemaker, tailor, binder, conductor, weaver, confectionist —corroborates this conclusion. It is highly doubtful that “workers” admitted to the Irkutsk State University workers’ faculty came from the bench and matched the ideal type of physical laborer. Most of them were semi-industrial workers, self-employed artisans, or Party functionaries who had been manual laborers.⁸² All of this calls for a reflection on how Soviet class categories were made. Rather than repeating with the Bolsheviks that workers, in the sociological sense of the term, were sent to educational institutions, we have to conclude that oftentimes an applicant became a “worker” because he was dispatched by what was considered to be a “workers’ organization.” This issue surfaced at Omsk Medical Institute when the Party agitation department insisted that “all trade union members were proletarian students,” whereas the dean believed that only “workers and their children” deserved the title.⁸³ “Workers” and “peasants” were never simply there, objectively given social entities. The Bolshevik practice of class ascription created them. When a student from the workers’ faculty demonstrated a certificate proving that a Party organization, 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

trade union, or village executive committee had sent him to study, this was evidence that he indeed belonged with the privileged classes. In dispatching an applicant, “proletarian” organizations bestowed upon him their class credentials.

The Art of Proletarian Self-Fashioning In the early s student periodicals and newssheets began to feature pieces depicting the admissions procedures at universities and workers’ faculties, and from these pieces students learned the rudiments of proletarian selffashioning. These sketches are examined here not as “descriptions” of the admissions process but as the production and inculcation of model narratives built around the differences between “proletarian” and “class alien” identities. In  a student journal published the “memoirs” of Vasilii Kosov, a youngster “whose large jaw and strong features make him look like a locksmith or a turner.” Three years earlier Vasilii had knocked at the doors of the workers’ faculty of the First Moscow State University. “The revolution broke down doors for us which had been firmly closed and now, . . . well, now everything is ours.” The description of Vasilii’s first day at the workers’ faculty is typical of the genre: “Comrade, are you from around here?” Kosov asked a person who stood nearby. “No, I am applying,” was the answer. “I also came here to apply. Let’s look into things together. Where are you from?” “I come from a village in Simbirsk.” “Are you a Party member or what?” “No, there are none in my area. How about you?” “I’m in the Party. Briefly put, I am a Communist. Live here for a while and you will get your head screwed on right. What is your name?” “Pavel Snegirev. What do I care? If it does any good we’ll join—why not? We have nothing against it. Just . . .” “Come with me,” said Kosov without letting him finish. The two young men make their way to the chancellery. “Ha ha! Here it is—the paper I mean—here it is. Did you get one?” “Naturally.” Kosov put his hand into his pocket. The chancery was thronged with people. Dozens of students cloistered around the tables, submitting different papers. 

              “               ” “Look at that! What a line!” said Snegirev. “No problem. I will find out what’s what,” Kosov replied, heading for a table.

They were sent to the secretary of the workers’ faculty, who proved friendly. The questioning, which covered everything, was for Kosov and his friend a lesson in the nature of the workers’ faculty. The secretary wrote with a thick blue pencil “to accept and provide with a stipend” on both applications. “Come again tomorrow at two o’clock for the examination.” “What is that?” asked Snegirev fearfully. “No big deal,” the secretary answered, smiling. “We will ask you about your occupation and assign you a place.”⁸⁴

The message was straightforward: those who had not had the chance in the past would get the opportunity to study, and it was up to Soviet institutions to decide who these were. A worker and Party member like Kosov deserved a place in the workers’ faculty and would get it. Soviet power was his own. Snegirev was a peasant, not a worker, and his political consciousness was not as developed as Kosov’s. Although he had a lot to learn, the regime believed he could do it. As a student in the workers’ faculty, he would rub shoulders with real workers and achieve enlightenment. Sketches also depicted those who were turned away, so that the lesson was taught by way of negative example as well. “The Commission, scrupulously fulfilling its duty, takes measures to ensure that the family of workers is not contaminated by vagabonds, those foreign elements which disrupt the family of workers’ faculty students. One applicant is told to come in two days, another to attend a plenum, and the third is rejected outright.” This language with its ideal of class purity and the images of pollution is symptomatic. A number of sketches described the unmasking of the typical contaminators of the “family of workers,” dangerous precisely because they pretended to be workers. The admissions personnel had to have their wits about them, the following passage suggests, to detect impostors: X is a Red Army soldier with a healthy, radiant face. He carries himself confidently: “Were you at the front?” “In the south. I was wounded and here is the certificate.” “Worked in industry?” “I was employed in a factory as a worker.” 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia” “Have documents?” “No, the factory burned down.” “Please note, comrades,” one member of the commission says to the others. “Isn’t it suspicious? During one year he was in twelve places—at the front, at headquarters, worked in a chancery.”

The applicant’s concealed identity was unmasked and he was decidedly rejected. “No doubt, a nonproletarian and already educated. All kinds of vagabonds try to enter workers’ faculties these days. Next!”⁸⁵ Literary pieces such as these taught the reader that class affiliation, often open to contradictory interpretation, could not be established on the basis of seemingly self-evident objective indexes alone and was ultimately to hinge on storytelling. The readers of the pedagogical sketches could find the material contained therein to be more or less accurate in comparison with their own personal experience, but they knew that they had to be attentive because what they read set the standard for proletarian self-presentation. The set of class identities and the means of identifying them by the institutions controlling Bolshevik discourse had to be understood if one wanted to enroll in higher education. A sample of complaints reaching Narkompros from students who had been rejected by universities in Leningrad and Siberia suggests the effectiveness with which the language of class was disseminated. All the rejected applicants knew that framing their appeals in terms of academic suitability would get them nowhere and that they had to couch their appeals in class terms; they had to prove that they or their parents belonged to the proletariat and so had a right to education. Rather than criticize the Narkompros exclusionary class-based admissions policy, these appellants declared that the mistake lay in an inappropriate application of class criteria to their own, concrete, class physiognomies. Such appeals only solidified the line separating the “toilers” from the “class aliens.” Kosulin, whose daughter was not accepted at Irkutsk State University, complained to the Siberian central admissions commission. His objections focused on his child’s confrontation with an aggressive examiner. “My daughter gave brilliant answers to all the questions during the examination and only failed to present the content of Karl Marx’s Manifesto. . . . What an achievement for the interrogator! He managed to throw off such an excellent pupil. The only problem is that the methods he used are appropriate in a court of law but not here.” Kosulin, a onetime member of the soviet of soldiers’ 

              “               ”

deputies, claimed to have played an active part in promoting the revolutionary cause in Kansk “with the specific goal of allowing my children to obtain the education that had been denied to me.” In his opinion, the Soviet government was under the obligation to fulfill such proletarian dreams. “I am a son of the poorest of peasants, a former serf, who moved to Siberia in .” Strategically allying himself with the Stolypin migrants, Kosulin declared that the government he had fought for could not betray the wretched of the earth.⁸⁶ A similar approach, appealing through the ideal of proletarianization, is evident in the argumentation of Aron Romanovich, who was turned down by Petrograd Institute of Communication Engineers in . Here the applicant was demanding not equality of opportunity but a class privilege. Aron wrote to his family: I received today the postcard in which you congratulated me for my success in the entrance examinations. Alas! It was today as well that I found out they have not let me in! I guess you can imagine my mood. Who has been accepted? The list they hung contains only names. It’s impossible to tell the social origins of the accepted. We know that two employees were taken, one expert’s son, and ten workers and the children of workers. I am ten times more deserving of privileges than many on the list. . . . I am determined to fight back. My energy is the energy of despair.

It did not occur to Aron to mention his success in the entrance exam in his formal appeal. Instead, he evaluated his own class background against those of his competitors. Aron’s father, who was a Party member of long standing, appealed to Iaroslavskii personally. He explained that his son had been a worker at the bench in Krikov’s wagon shops and had four years of experience as a blacksmith’s assistant: Denying my son admission is a slap in my face. Given his social position, he should have been one of the first in line. I myself was a hired wage laborer all my life. Only after demobilization from the Red Army was I reduced to being an ordinary employee. Though my Party standing goes back only to , I participated in the February uprising and the uprising in July. Furthermore, I am still a Party activist though I am fifty-two years old and physically broken. I have been a participant in the revolutionary movement since . Comrades, I insist on a thorough investigation of this case.



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

The original appeal was marked by a decision in Iaroslavskii’s own handwriting: “To investigate! Regardless of the specifics of this case, I would like to know what kind of people were accepted to the university this year!”⁸⁷ In a complaint to the Siberian regional Department of People’s Education in October , another outraged father whose daughter was rejected by the Irkutsk State University endorsed the principle of class exclusionism: Circumstances force me to speak of that about which I was inclined to be silent. I do not seek exceptions or privileges. No, I just ask for what the speculators, the merchants and other individuals alien to the Soviet power are getting. This August the following individuals were examined by the admissions commission together with my daughter: Rugutkin—a former Kolchak officer—and Guiudus and Frolov—sons of hereditary merchants who even now engage in trade and financial speculation. All three of them failed exams but somehow were accepted. I know that his admission cost Frolov one hundred rubles and that Rugutkin confessed to having been admitted not because he knew more than anyone else but thanks to someone’s patronage. How can it be that my daughter cannot go to school with them? Remember that she is the daughter of a worker and that as early as the age of ten, she was participating with the adults in dangerous Party work, passing messages in and out of the jail and helping to guard the building where an underground Party committee met.⁸⁸

While applicants naturally tried to present themselves in the best light possible, they could not invent their class identity from scratch. Fabricated stories could easily backfire. Consider the case of Zhilin, who was denied access to Leningrad Military Medical Academy in May  for “concealment of social origins.” The applicant argued that “according to Narkompros instructions children of NEP men such as myself can study in the universities when vacancies appear; why is it then that when I asked to enroll in place of one of the ten students purged as ‘academically inactive’ I was denied?” According to Narkompros, Zhilin had lied in his application, a crime that could lead to a jail sentence. “While social origins are not an insurmountable barrier, serving rather as a basis for comparing different candidates, Zhilin concealed his identity as the son of a dealer. This sort of misrepresentation of one’s social position is a misdemeanor for which the punishment of being purged from the university has to be considered a minimum. The charge of fraud and court litigation are possible as well.”⁸⁹



              “               ”

The Disenfranchised While the  “Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People” promulgated with the constitution of RSFSR was in many ways a recapitulation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man issued at the outset of the French Revolution, the rights of freedom of speech, association, assembly, and education were, in the later document, reserved for the proletariat alone. When it came to higher education, one might modify the declaration’s famous dictum, “he who does not work shall not eat,” to read, “he who does not work shall not study.” Chapter  of the constitution limited citizens’ rights to those who “earn their living through production or socially useful labor.” All outcast classes were relegated to the category of the “disenfranchised” (lishentsy). Loosely defined, this category included several heterogeneous groups: () the so-called former people (byvshie liudi)—primarily religious functionaries and employees of the tsarist police and military; () class aliens—landowners, individuals who lived off unearned income, exploiters, private traders; () administrative exiles and individuals who had their rights suspended by a court; () individuals economically dependent on the previously listed; and () the mentally ill.⁹⁰ The formally disenfranchised should not be confused with the groups who faced obstacles in gaining admission to a university. For the disenfranchised, access to learning was flatly denied as a matter of principle. Only those children of the so-called parasite classes who had publicly repudiated their parents were accepted to the universities. Repudiation typically took the form of the following sort of announcement published in a newspaper: “I, so-and-so, hereby announce that I reject my parents, so and so, as alien elements, and declare that I have nothing in common with them.” Poletika recalled that “occasionally that kind of repudiation opened the door to a university education, while at other times even repudiation did not help.”⁹¹ Since none was likely to define himself as class alien, applicants were pushed into that category by the admissions commissions. “In general,” one Party report stated, “children of the nonworking elements try to prove that their parents’ occupations had been prompted by need and that they had not really been merchants, but rather employees of bigger commercial magnates.” Tomsk State University officials described the pressure applied by “idle elements,” “the clergy,” and “merchant children” on the admissions commission as “considerable”:



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia” The disenfranchised used all kinds of ploys to get in. The son of a priest, for example, wrote that he was the son of a peasant and presented a certificate from the village soviet to that effect, the daughter of a steam mill owner described herself as the “daughter of an artisan”’ and a son of a cantor wrote that his father “sang in a choir.” Unfortunately, the questionnaires of these applicants, indicating acceptable social identities, were kindly certified by local authorities.

When the Tomsk State University admissions commission turned down a member of the Marinsk Komsomol, pointing out that she was “petit bourgeois,” the applicant retorted valiantly, “Whatever you do to me, I will obtain a spot in the university!” Shortly thereafter, she returned with a dispatch from the Siberian Department of Peoples’ Education “to fill a workers’ faculty vacancy.” Only after much labor did the university Komsomol representative manage to secure her disqualification as “socially alien.” In a related case, the secretary of the same admissions commission put a certain Moshchitskii into the disenfranchised category even though the applicant had a valid trade union dispatch because he knew Moshchitskii was the son of a guild merchant who had been “alien to proletarian ideology until .” “Unmasked,” Moshchitskii was denied consideration despite having managed to register at the store of an uncle as an “employee,” enroll in the employees’ union, and obtain a university dispatch.⁹² A relatively comprehensive set of data exists on the social backgrounds of the disenfranchised students who were rejected by Tomsk universities in – (see table ). After the admissions exams had already been administered, three additional disenfranchised individuals were unmasked at the Tomsk Technological Institute: “the son of a merchant,” “the son of a gold mine owner,” and “the son of a colonel in the former army.” On one occasion in Tomsk, a group identified as among the disenfranchised was the “big intelligentsia,” a curious echo of the “big bourgeoisie.”⁹³ Many of the disenfranchised showed considerable ingenuity in attempting to talk themselves out of their predicament. Iakovlev, who was turned down by Irkutsk State University, wrote: True, my father was a “townsperson of the city of Irkutsk,” a clockmaker. But I myself have earned my bread as an accountant in soviet institutions since adolescence. I could not have worked more conscientiously had I been a physical laborer. Since I enlisted in the Red Army and in wartime pledged



              “               ” Table 3 Social Position of Students Not Allowed to Take Entrance Exams in Tomsk, 1926 and 1927 Tomsk Technological Institute, 1926

Tomsk State University, 1927

Live on nonworking income

5

4

Merchants

5

5

Children of clergy

2

4

Children of big landlords

2

3

Trustee of large private firms

1

0

Employee in Soviet institution

1

0

Captain in the tsarist army

0

1

Former policeman

0

1

16

18

Totals

Source: GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , l. .

to defend workers and peasants I think that in peacetime I have the same right to study as they do.

When her two children were not admitted to entrance exams for Omsk Medical Institute, their mother made an elaborate plea before the Narkompros plenipotentiary in Siberia. “Yes, my husband Gedalii Leonovich Zil’berg is an artisan. But from the days before the Revolution until now he has earned his living as a watchmaker without any recourse to hired labor. I sold butter door-to-door during my husband’s illness not because I desired nonworking income but simply as a way to survive.” The admissions commission had a different story to tell. Evidence was presented that Gedalii Leonovich “had been a merchant during the last five to six years who quit his trade in order to facilitate his children’s entrance into educational institutions only three months before the start of the admissions campaign.” The children remained disenfranchised. A schoolteacher rejected by Tomsk Technological Institute as a “former servant of the cult” hoped that his reinterpretation of admissions rules might convince authorities at least to consider his candidacy: “The rules for application stipulate that ‘workers and peasants are to enjoy advantages over the nonproletarian elements.’” But, he asked with considerable ingenuity and perhaps a note of sarcasm as well, “against whom will they possibly have that ‘advantage’ if children of nonworking elements are not even allowed to take exams?”⁹⁴ 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

Others joined the ranks of the disenfranchised because their parents owned real estate. No matter how hard a certain Vorsin tried to persuade the Tomsk Technological Institute’s admissions commission to consider the application of his son, flatly denying that he rented out houses in Tomsk, his efforts came to naught. The son of a certain Busygin, another trafficker in real estate, bombarded Narkompros with a myriad of personal details: The Busygins adopted me only at the age of eight. I was born to a peasant, a certain Popugaev. Besides, Busygin, my adoptive father, was a hired laborer from  on and at the present time he is a member of the union of soviet employees. My adoptive father’s social position was investigated when he joined the trade union and then double-checked during the elections of the city soviet. It was established that our house, which is worth two thousand rubles, brings no income. Otherwise the trade union and the city soviet would never have opened their doors to him. Indeed, my father and mother and I all have the right to vote for the city soviet. The admissions commission disregarded this fact, though the city soviet is the institution best suited to judging the social position and personal history of the inhabitants of the city of Tomsk.

The supplicant made a double claim: that he was actually a proletarian by blood and that the admissions commission had no right to overrule a soviet’s decision regarding the status of his adoptive father.⁹⁵ The Tomsk workers’ faculty refused entrance to Domozhakov, a member of the Khakas Siberian minority, suspecting that he was wealthy and therefore disenfranchised. His case illustrates how difficult it was to squeeze individuals coming from the periphery of Russia, with its peculiar economic structure, into the general class blueprint. An unidentified protector interceded on Domozhakov’s behalf, construing a positive identity for his protégé. “In terms of the economic conditions in Khakasiia, where an average household has – horses, – cows and up to  sheep, a rich man may have as many as , horses and ,–, sheep. If applicants from Khakasiia were accepted only if they belonged to the normal peasant economy, that would mean death to Khakasiia.” Domozhakov’s benefactor maintained that the criteria according to which Domozhakov had been disenfranchised were inappropriate for Khakasiia. “Perhaps,” he wondered, “the administration is suspicious because of the amount of Domozhakov’s annual payment— rubles and  kopecks. But this is a normal tax for cattlebreeding economies; by no means should it be equated with the peasant norm.” Just in case this argument did not work, the national minorities’ theme was also put forward. 

              “               ”

“Everywhere we stress that backward nationalities should produce Soviet cadres, and yet Domozhakov’s place in the workers’ faculty was taken by a Russian. This should be reversed.”⁹⁶

The University Purge With the initiation of NEP came a new practice at the universities: purges. The periodic academic purge (chistka: literally, “cleansing”) was presented as a necessary step in reducing the size of the student body, a step demanded because of financial cuts in the Narkompros budget.⁹⁷ A deeper reason for student purges, however, should be sought in a burning concern with pollution. The Party believed it imperative to develop an institutional practice to separate the pure from the impure. The impure, those whose activities were at odds with the Party’s messianic mission—NEP speculators, “idle elements,” political oppositionists, and so on—were an important element in the boundary separating the “ins” and the “outs” of the proletarian society. The “outside,” however, could not remain outside, just as the “inside” could not be just inside. Defining one another, proletarians and class aliens were interdependent categories that did not carry any meaning in isolation. The “other” had to be constantly identified, shown, pointed to. The essence of the definition of the “other” lay not so much in the static description of a social group but in the active process of “defining”—in the present case, defining who should be in and who should be out of the universities. According to state authorities, the other could not be an abstraction residing far outside the university; rather it had to be familiar to the members of the student community. And so “bourgeois” students, although barred from enrolling, miraculously reappeared within the university walls, to be unmasked and purged time and again. Driven from the worker-peasant paradise, they demonstrated the paradise’s exclusiveness. In a poem entitled “A Pesky Fly,” a Siberian student writing under the pseudonym Vrednyi (“injurious”) expressed concern at the thought of “others” infiltrating the proletarian collective: Odnazhdy mukha . . . mukha . . . nu, Navoznaia, nazoilivaia mukha, Uvidela pchelu, Kotoraia s trudom svoe tashchila briukho,



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia” I vot ona, Zadumala sama, Polakomitsia medom, I s pchelami kompaniiu svesti, Chtob s nimi vmeste zhit’, rabotat’ i rasti. Raz proletaia ogorodom, Pozad’ odnoi, Sovsem prostoi, Krest’ianskoi khaty, Pochuiala vdrug aromaty, Chto medu medu neskol’ko srodni, (A ei vsego milei oni) I so vsego razmakhu, Bez rassuzhdeniia, be strakhu, Prorvavshi moshkary kruzhashchei tuchu, Uselas’ mukha v kuchu, (Pozapastis’ tam medom zakhotela), I, revnost’iu goria, Ni s kem ne govoria, Svoe vse vymazavshi telo, V pchelinyi ulei s gordost’iu vletela. “Tovarishchi, podrugi i grazhdanki,” Tak mukha nachala, sadias’ v chuzhii sanki: “Pozvol’te vam zadat’ vopros: Menia vy primite v sovkhoz? Kak videte, rabotat’ ia umeiu, I sil svoikh niskol’ko ne zhaleiu. Primite ot menia obi’lnyi etot vznos.” Tut pchely vse, zazhavshi nos, K nakhalke podleteli, I ele-ele, Sobravshi vsiu pchelinu moch’, Ee s trudom prognali proch’. Smysl basni, kol’ poniat’ khotite, mezhdu prochim, Skazhu, chto ulei—to rabfak, Il’ fakul’tet rabochii, Zabravshiisia v nego kulak, Takogo nanesti tam mozhet dukhu, Chto vspomnish mukhu.⁹⁸



              “               ” One day a fly . . . a fly . . . a fly, well then, / Still smelling of the dunghill, a pesky fly / Saw a bee / Which dragged its belly slowly / And then, well, she thought: “Why not me? / Why should not I be licking that honey? / Why should not I join the bees, / To live with them, to work, to grow? / Then, flying past / A simple peasant hut, / She sensed a smell, / A smell akin to naught but honey / (And there was naught she liked so well). / And so, with brio, / No stop for reasoning, nor fear, / She broke through the thick mosquito cloud / And sat down on the steaming pile / Anticipating the nectar of the bees. / Ardor-blinded, speaking not a word, / Smearing her body with dung from head to toe / She sailed into the hive—”All aboard! / Comrades, friends, and fellow citizens,” / Began the fly, ensconced in the others’ sledge, / “May I ask a question? May I join your Soviet farm? / As you can see, I can certainly work, / And none could ever say I shirk. / Accept these generous dues from me.” / —Here all the bees, holding their noses tight shut, / Swarmed around the cheeky fly. / And only just / With a mighty beethrust / Ejected her sans any good-bye. / The meaning of this tale, should you care to know’t, / Is this: the hive is the “workfac,” / The workers’ faculty, that is. / And the kulak who should his way worm in / May raise such a cloud of odiferous scent / That you will realize ’tis fly that’s meant.

The lesson of the fable is clear: those who infiltrate the workers’ faculty must be identified and expelled. The student press explained: “it is the task of every student to make sure that those who have no right to be in a workers’ faculty are purged, thereby vacating spots for workers.” Whereas the NEP man is “shocked by the possibility that one of his relatives will not earn a diploma and prays that he may avoid a similar fate,” the worker fears that the purges spare too many and that “human scum fills up every academic vacancy.”⁹⁹ In July , Narkompros issued the so-called Regulations on the Reregistration of Students. Many students as a result found themselves outside the university walls. According to incomplete data, the student survey in Petrograd led to the purging of about  percent of the student body. The expelled were described as “idle elements.”¹⁰⁰ Still, all authorities agree that the most comprehensive student purge took place two years later. In April , , the Narkompros presidium euphemistically announced “a general verification of students’ academic progress” (akademproverka). A week later Sovnarkom called for a diminution in the number of students nationwide. The May  Pravda article, “Let’s Purge the Ballast!” signed by Khodorovskii, constituted the official commencement of the purge.¹⁰¹ 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

Checkup commissions were instructed to scrutinize all the students, regardless of how they had entered the universities—through workers’ faculties, dispatches, or open admission. Officially, the purge was motivated by “the need to relieve the universities of their surplus of students, to allow universities to provide normal study conditions to the remaining students, and to match the number of graduates with the actual requirements of the national economy.” Since the range of sociopolitical criteria was considerable (including “social position,” “level of sociopolitical development,” “prospects of being integrated into productive labor,” as well as “the opinions of professors’ and students’ organizations”—read: Party cells), proletarianization was clearly also on the agenda.¹⁰² The purge was extended to workers’ faculties as well. Although Pokrovskii was able to state at the Second Workers’ Faculty Conference in  that the proportion of working-class students in workers’ faculties had risen from  percent to  percent over the last two years, the general belief was that “alien and politically unreliable elements” still survived there in alarming numbers.¹⁰³ The political agenda that fueled the purge is eloquently evidenced by the high degree of control over the procedure maintained by Party and GPU organs. Zinoviev’s appearance at Narkompros collegium’s meeting in March —the only Narkompros meeting attended by a Politburo member during the s—further indicates that the discussion of the forthcoming purge must have been political.¹⁰⁴ The Party leadership was clearly concerned about the support the Opposition had enjoyed among students during the recent Discussion. The Thirteenth Party Conference, marked by the complete victory over Trotsky of the Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviev triumvirate, had resolved “to eradicate the petit bourgeois elements hiding in our institutions of higher education.” The Central Committee believed that the “declassed elements thronging the universities” were a prominent group susceptible to the demagogic slogans of the Opposition. The heads of the Party adduced official statistics to show that in the – academic year only . percent of the students were “workers,” compared to . percent “peasants,” . percent “employees,” and . percent “others.” Secret directives were promptly issued to Narkompros, demanding a reduction in the size of the student body nationwide by at least thirty thousand.¹⁰⁵ The decision as to who was to be purged was carried out by a direct interrogation of the student. Students who had exceeded the normal length of time required to complete their studies were to be given a chance to complete their degree requirements by the beginning of ; those who failed 

              “               ”

would lose their places in the university. Clause  in the instructions issued by the Central Purge Commission described the class requirements that students had to meet: “Students who come from bourgeois or intelligentsia backgrounds and are materially secure must have completed all courses and passed all examinations taken up to the present.” Students from the toiling peasantry were treated more leniently and were to be purged only if their progress was clearly hopeless. Working-class students were not to be purged at all unless they were hopeless academic failures. If a proletarian student’s academic failure had been brought about by time-consuming social tasks, he was to be given a “grace period to eliminate his incompletes.” The Party Central Committee added to the Narkompros directive the stipulation that “the category of proletarian students must be understood to include not only the working class but Party and Komsomol members as well.” Clause  in the Narkompros instructions was particularly important: “Students who are hostile to the politics of Soviet Power and adverse to the proletarianization of the university are to be purged.” Whereas purging on the basis of clause  was within the responsibility of university Party cells, clause  allowed for the intervention of GPU. When a student was purged, the purge commission had to record in the student’s grade book (zachetnaia knizhka) “expelled from the university during verification”; the grade book was also to be signed by the commission’s chairman and certified by the school’s official stamp.¹⁰⁶ The Central Purge Commission compiled a list of motives to be specified when expulsion was called for. When proletarian students were involved, the center suggested such formulas as “purged for inability to cope with the university program” or “purged for carelessness in academic matters.” When “nonproletarians” were to be purged, the proposed formulas were “purged for hostility to Soviet power” and “purged for social incompatibility and academic failure.” Finally, when students from the “toiling peasantry” had to be expelled, the commission advised using “a combination of the first and the second purge motive formulas.”¹⁰⁷ What was stated in the official files of the purged students directly affected their chances of being reintegrated into society. In September , the Narkompros collegium, at the insistence of Lunacharskii, drew up a bulletin stating that, “owing to oversights on the part of some commissions reviewing the student body, the official files of those expelled have been marked ‘Alien Element.’ . . . In fact, these students are not in disgrace, and their removal from the university does not carry with it any limitation of their rights.” 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

It is symptomatic, however, that the collegium was unable to win an endorsement of its clarification by Party authorities, or to have it published in the press, and the endorsement appeared only in Narkompros’s own journal. The distinction between purged students and officially disenfranchised men and women remained invisible.¹⁰⁸ The bulk of the work involved in the university purges fell on the shoulders of faculty commissions, groups made up of the faculty’s dean, his assistant, and a number of students assigned by the Party cell. Members of the commissions had to be present when students filled out the questionnaires drawn up to assess the status of candidates for purging. The process had to be closely monitored and the preliminary commissions were warned against calling too many students to a session; there had to be at least one supervisor for every five completed questionnaires. The characteristics of each and every student had to be written down into a protocol, and appended to this was to be a list of students marked for purging. The recommendations of the preliminary commission were based only partially on the information the commission had received from the faculty regarding students’ academic achievements. Academic progress reports were assessed with regard to an alphabetical list of students known as belonging to the working class or the peasantry; a list of the Party and Komsomol members in the university; and the Party bureau’s evaluation of students’ “social activities” on a scale of one to five. The last list was included to protect those students who lagged behind because of the burden of public responsibilities they shouldered. The preliminary commissions forwarded all the material amassed from the scrutiny of official student files to the general university purge commission—a body consisting of a chairman, nominated by Narkompros, and additional members delegated by the university’s professional sections and administrative board. The Siberian Department of Enlightenment established the following procedure: “Collect the students’ grades and official files and familiarize yourself with every student through questioning. This procedure should not be akin to interrogation.” If a case required further clarification, the commission asked for additional material from the Party cells and the GPU.¹⁰⁹ This intricate procedure meant that the perspectives of the various organs inside and outside the university institutions could be accommodated. Professors, students, and janitors were all active participants in the purges, defending their own identity and worldview and utilizing whatever organizational backing was available. Liberal professors used their positions in the admin

              “               ”

istration and the purge commission to push for a more academic university. Communist students, by contrast, pushed for a rigorous enforcement of class purity through their hold over political organizations within and outside the university. The Communist students ran the faculty commissions: the Tomsk State University Party cell, for example, prided itself on “nominating students as chairmen of subcommittees despite Narkompros rules that officials should serve in this capacity.”¹¹⁰ Purge commissions included large numbers of district Party functionaries in their numbers; they also solicited the opinions of university Party cells on every student whose case proved controversial. The different agendas jockeying for position in the purges can be examined by focusing on the language employed by the different camps. From the perspective of Narkompros, the political and social physiognomy of the students was hardly relevant. Lunacharskii stated that what interested him primarily was cutting down the size of the student body that his organization was unable to finance. Echoing the Narkompros way of framing the issue, the administrative board of Tomsk Technological Institute announced that the purge was “a golden opportunity to reduce the number of its students to a more manageable fifteen hundred.”¹¹¹ When the Party cell of the Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers paid lip service to the official purge motives—“let’s relieve the institute of superfluous students who exceed our capacity”—one of the local deans was taken by this rhetoric: “As a citizen of the republic who wishes for prosperity,” he said, “I am confident the purge will affect only educational institutions that prepare more graduates than the republic’s economy actually needs.” His naïveté became manifest when the Party cell in his own institute assigned class issue “a fundamental place in the conduct of the purge.”¹¹² The professoriate strongly objected to such blatant intrusions of politics into academic life. The clash between professors and Party authorities was particularly acute in Irkutsk, notoriously the most “class polluted” of Siberian universities. In April , when rumors of the approaching purge surfaced, Communists at the Irkutsk State University set to work identifying “purge candidates.” With the arrival of the official circular opening the purge, five hundred candidates for expulsion were already available. The local GPU agent declared with pride that the list had received “our close cooperation.” According to a secret report, “when news of the purge spread, the level of anxiety in the university skyrocketed. Some students believed  to  percent of them would be expelled. While bourgeois students spread rumors about demonstrations and 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

student uprisings in Moscow, proletarian students believed that the purge was long overdue.” Proletarian students had in mind the “Kharbin students,” characterized as “socially alien and politically hostile” and considered the last bastion of the counterrevolution in eastern Siberia. Eventually, more than  percent of the fourth-year medical students were marked to be purged because of the “preponderance of an aristocratic-White element among them.” The so-called Vygovskii Ten—an informal organization formed in  by the “rightist professorship struggling against Communist preponderance in the university”—was a particularly important GPU target. The GPU was furious that the “retrograde professors defend this notorious organization with particular vigor although among its members are children of monarchists, of landowners and of the big bourgeoisie.” Much to the dismay of the GPU, even Professor Toporov, while disassociating himself from the rightists, sided with the Vygovskiites, saying that they were “good medical students even if their origins were not proletarian, as a result of which they might become a tool of anti-Soviet powers.”¹¹³ The academic personnel serving on the boards of preliminary faculty commissions at Irkutsk University strongly opposed the politically motivated purge. A professor of medicine, Sheviakov, often sided against the Party zealots and demanded that in each and every instance his dissenting recommendation be recorded in the protocol.¹¹⁴ The purge commission received a host of petitions calling for the absolution of the fourth- and fifth-year students, who were described as “the pride of the university and the republic.” Professors threatened that if their pleas went unheeded they would retaliate against the loyalist students by impressing upon them “the academic importance of the nonproletarian part of the student body.” Professor Sheviakov went so far as to refuse to sign the preliminary list of the expelled. His likeminded peer, Professor Mel’nikh, submitted to the purge commission a petition well worth quoting at length: Many of the medical students in their final year were singled out to be purged despite their excellent performances. Doesn’t Russia need good doctors? . . . What the real reasons for their expulsion are I do not know. It cannot be absenteeism from public work. It was the Communist students themselves who proposed to abolish compulsory public work because of its harmful effects on academic advancement. . . . Did not Comrade Semashko declare at the Second Congress of the Soviets that under the new regime higher education would be open to all? Do we not boast that tsarist quotas have been 

              “               ” banished? . . . If political motives are at play, I think the suspected students should have been called to court and tried according to the laws of the USSR. But it is unjust to assign a permanent stigma to students descended from clergy, noble or merchant estates. Consider the following: Had the son of the distinguished leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin studied in our university, would we move to purge him as the son of a nobleman? Be merciful toward good medical students!¹¹⁵

The letter, a masterpiece of professorial rhetoric, exposed the official discourse as duplicitous. Mel’nikh pointed both toward the contradiction between the country’s thirst for experts and the waste of skilled manpower and toward the tension between the VTsIK’s declaration that all citizens were equal and the Party’s antipathy to the “socially alien.” The dean of the university offered an ingenious compromise of his own to the standoff over the medical students: “Since we are dealing with those soon to become doctors, whom Siberia badly needs, let them take their final examination without attending lectures.” This way, the dean explained, the “alien element” would have been removed from the student body but the expertise would not be lost. The issue went back and forth between Party and state agencies, and the purge commission in the Irkutsk State University “had to work in a state of constant anxiety.”¹¹⁶ At first Narkompros instructions were to subject all students to the purge. On May , , the local daily announced that final-year students were not to be scrutinized after all. Although the original intention was to get rid of at least half the student body, only one in five medical students was actually purged. The success of the professoriate in defending many of its protégés was hardly celebrated by the school’s “proletarian students,” who resented the clipping of the purge commission’s wings. Because of widespread criticism, the latter complained, “the graduating students’ diplomas had to be returned.” The blame was laid at the feet of the “conservative professoriate” and the “bourgeois” opposition to a class-based purge. The Tomsk State University Party cell expressed similar views: “The reactionary-conservative professorial cadres, led by their inveterate leader, the rector Savin, tightly clenched into a factious fist. When we asked Savin how he would feel if the department’s majority voted with us he responded that ‘it would mean breaking the ranks of scholarly workers, and our utter disorganization.’ ” The Party projected its eschatological thinking onto the professoriate, which was blamed for deliberately retarding student salvation. “Systematizing and intensifying 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

their activities,” the report noted with suppressed anger, “the conservative powers Savin is presiding over lead students astray and prevent them from achieving class consciousness.”¹¹⁷ In the Party’s perception of the struggle, the professoriate utilized the same military techniques the Bolsheviks had, directing them to the opposite aim: “The professoriate does all it can to split students and to maintain an anti-Soviet political line. . . . In the mathematics department a semilegal faction functions under the leadership of Professor Kuznetsov. Its decisions are binding; members have to honor them at the departmental meetings.” Tomsk Communists also projected onto the enemy their own determination to convert students: the Tomsk professoriate was accused of having forged a disciplined and unitary nucleus of followers, of “having divided students into groups,” of having propagandized the weakest among them and drawn sympathizers to its side. The professors leading this counterrevolution had to be “unmasked” and “ruthlessly eradicated.”¹¹⁸ The Party cells evaluated students in terms of their position along a continuum from darkness to light. They imagined the university as a battleground between the class-conscious proletarians, the swamp, and the counterrevolutionaries. Stuck in the middle, the philistine student majority was in constant danger of succumbing to the temptations of NEP. To prevent such lapses, Bolshevik students had to aggressively engage counterrevolutionary forces and convert as many students as possible. A spokesman for the Party cell of the Tomsk Technological Institute argued that “the student swamp cannot stay neutral forever. Some will take our side; others will become our enemies.”¹¹⁹ This set of premises was reflected in the way the Party reports broke down the student body into “Communist supporters,” “counterrevolutionaries,” and the “politically vacillating and spineless middle.” In , Party officials applied the tripartite division in regard to the general composition of the student body: “a ridiculously tiny group of Communist students on the one side of the class barricade; a counterrevolutionary socialist block comprised of Anarchists, SRs and Mensheviks on the other side; and in the middle numerous battalions of politically ignorant and indifferent youth who deserve the label “non-Party student swamp.”¹²⁰ The historian who investigates the veracity of these data, enhancing or diminishing the estimated support enjoyed by the Bolsheviks, risks reproducing those basic premises of the Bolshevik discourse which motivated the eschatological dissection of the student body in the first place. 

              “               ”

The authors of a  survey of all students in the Leningrad area concluded that the class struggle of the recent years had affected students’ class alignment. “The shift of the non-Party students toward the Soviet Power, observable since , should be understood as a class phenomenon. It is well known that the grip of the working class on state power has drawn the student petit bourgeois intelligentsia to its side.” But the eschatologically prescribed tripartite division of the student body remained intact: . “Non-Party students” who conceal their counterrevolutionary sympathies. Children of NEP, they penetrate into the universities little by little. . A fluid and ideologically spineless public that puts itself “above politics.” Here we have children of priests, children of small clerks, teachers and offspring of the “hereditary” and “honorary” merchants. These students had smelled the gunpowder of the Civil War and had lived through War Communism, events that forced them to sever ties with their background. Yet, they are still susceptible to “democratic” influences. . “Nearly Communist students” . . . who have acquired a revolutionary and resolute ideology. They push for the new forms of everyday life (communes, cooperatives and mutual aid funds), embrace the reform of higher education and honor the Party.¹²¹

From the Bolshevik perspective, the student group made up of counterrevolutionaries and class aliens was to be purged; the one with a mixed physiognomy could be brought under Party hegemony; while the students loyal to the regime were the group carrying out this social engineering. The Leningrad State University Party cell was committed to this project, stating that “the forthcoming purge should be regarded as a way to proletarianize our student body.” But the Party meeting held on February , , showed there was disagreement on the means to this goal. Whereas the cell’s bureau recommended an extensive purge, Comrade Semenov, in a minority opinion, argued that administrative measures alone would be insufficient. “Education is a weapon of equal importance in combating the petit bourgeois beast.” His opponent, Comrade Miller, defended the official position: “In the best of cases our student mass is made up of petit bourgeois fellow travelers, not transmitters of the Communist influence.” Leningrad State University had to be “protected from alien elements,” said Miller, and he supported a class-based purge that would “rely strictly on workers.” The argument was ultimately resolved by Comrade Shelepugina, who reminded the



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

debaters of the power of Communist discipline: “The Party Conference resolved to embark on a comprehensive student purge. We, the leadership of the Party cell and of the Party’s old guard, must carry out its instructions.” The cell resolved to make the main targets of the purge “the petite bourgeoisie. Its removal would open the bottleneck presently blocking the advancement of the proletariat.” Those to be purged were described as “politically colorless,” “philistine intelligentsia,” “traditionalists,” and “active opponents of proletarianization.”¹²² In addition to the professoriate and the Party cell, the GPU was an important participant in the student purge. When the internal security of the Dictatorship of the Proletarian was perceived to be at stake, Narkompros and the local Party organizations yielded authority forthwith to the so-called Sword of the Revolution.¹²³ A top secret  circular issued by GPU required the Party cells to report the names of politically active student organizations and of their numbers. When a list of politically untrustworthy students was leaked at the Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers, the leak caused considerable embarrassment to the GPU, which preferred to operate behind the scenes. Still, in early s Siberia, the land where “native-born enemies united with the counterrevolutionaries who arrived from European Russia,” university purges were carried out primarily by GPU, which used in this task not only its local informers but also the general Tomsk information apparatus. The GPU’s summary of purge-related activities maintained that some students argued that the purge would mean a civic death and the demise of culture altogether. False rumors circulated that in Moscow and Leningrad protests had taken place and that Lunacharskii had been booed. It was even said that as a result of the purge only Jews would remain in academic institutions. In our camp, however, the purge was accepted and understood. After the appearance of the sparse lists of the expelled, proletarian students realized that political loyalty was the key issue and declared that the purge commission was on the right track.

Although the agendas of the GPU and of the Party cell in many ways coincided, the former acted on behalf of the omnipotent center, whereas the horizon of the latter was supposed to be limited to local affairs alone.¹²⁴ The events at the Siberian Medical Institute exemplify the struggle between the political line and the academic line during the  purge.¹²⁵ The head of the local purge commission, Grandsberg, stated that “the purge de-



              “               ”

cree has found the social composition of our student body in good shape. Already a year ago we expelled the White element from the institute. As the expulsion of class aliens required only a minimum of activity I seldom had to resort to clause .” Grandsberg insisted that counterrevolutionary students had already been removed by the GPU. Clearly siding with the professoriate, she did her best to keep Communist students away from the purge commission. But Grandsberg had to admit that “in this task I was not fully successful.” Local Communists had compiled lists of prospective purge candidates in the expectation that the purge commission would simply rubberstamp them. The academically minded Grandsberg was upset by the power wielded by the cell. “Party representatives on the commission had not risen an inch above the level of the institute’s cell. Immature, they relied only on their revolutionary conscience, which was not always beyond reproach, and ignored Narkompros instructions.” To gain some leverage against the uppity Party cell, Grandsberg presented herself as the GPU’s loyal proxy. Despite her own contention that only one year earlier the institute’s board of administration had removed thirty-six “dead souls” and was now “free from counterrevolutionaries,” she compromised with the GPU, provided that at least the appearance of the academic purge was sustained. “The GPU has been very helpful in spotting the politically suspect,” Grandsberg stated, “and has provided us with a list of fifteen students who fell into that category. Luckily, I managed to assign a number of students they had singled out for expulsion to the ‘academically inadequate’ category. The rest had to be purged on the basis of clause .” But the GPU did not recognize Grandsberg as its faithful adherent. Indeed, throughout  the GPU kept its ties with the Party organs “as close as possible” and criticized the head of the purge commission for taking “a wavering line and framing the purge as purely academic.” Grandsberg’s position was damaged when an informant overheard her declare defiantly of the GPU: “If they have received incriminating material regarding certain students, let them have our administrative boards do the expelling. Why use the Narkompros checkup as a pretext?” The GPU enforced the purge of academically successful students identified as socially undesirable through the Party’s provincial committee. “We were saved,” Grandsberg tried to boast before her Narkompros allies, “when one of our former students who is in charge of the agitation department, put things straight.” In fact, however, the only students who were spared were those against whom the GPU had no particularly damning evidence.¹²⁶ Although Vol’fovich, the chairman of Tomsk Technological Institute’s 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

purge commission, expressed regret that “the short notice prevented us from working through the issues in the local press or in student gatherings,” the purges at the institute must be considered a sort of a model. Given the short time at its disposal, the commission had to interrogate between  and  students daily. Only students who had fallen under the suspicion of the preliminary commission were questioned in person. “Under such working conditions long discussions with students could not be held.” The commission limited itself to assessing students’ academic performance, their participation in professional organizations, their support of the implementation of university reform, and their class affiliation. Each student was judged based on material gathered by faculty commissions and files kept by the institute’s archive. The purge commission assumed the formidable task of synthesizing the purge’s political, social, and academic agendas and setting itself strict priorities. The first to be purged were “actively counterrevolutionary students” —this amounted to a mere . percent of the student body, a figure that “reflected the effectiveness of the proletarianization policy conducted in the institute.” Next came the “academic ballast.” This category, invoked in . percent of the expulsions, was applied to the “philistine swamp, worthless in an academic and social sense.” The last category to be removed consisted of “the children of well-off employees and idle elements.” The discovery that the academic criteria were tempered by class criteria was for the Party cell “a source of immense pride.” Only in the case of the “bourgeois intelligentsia which had absolutely no excuse to lag behind since it was wealthy, well prepared and able to devote all of its time to study” was “fulfillment of academic requirements” interpreted to mean they should have passing grades in all the courses they had taken. “Prospering” students took exams frantically, hoping to amass as many credits as possible and come close to the  percent academic success, “a ploy in which they were assisted by retrograde professors who allowed their protégés to take up to three exams a day.” For the remaining students, academic standards were much lower. The Party cell credited itself with “putting class before academic performance. . . . Nonproletarian students were purged in droves because they were dangerous, more likely to become ‘wrecking engineers’ than ‘Red engineers.’ ” Still, zealots of the proletarianization confessed that: political considerations did not always prevail. We had to sanction the purge of workers if their academic performance was abysmal. They have no excuse, since other lads do well even though they shoulder the same load of Party 

              “               ” work. Nevertheless, we did not like to see them go—this is an element that had passed through the revolutionary crucible. The time will come when they can return to their studies.¹²⁷

Out of the , students in the Tomsk Technological Institute,  ( percent) were purged. The purge commission’s summary of the class aspect of the purge is shown in table . What is really significant to my analysis is not so much the numerical results of the purge, but the narrative detailing how such statistics unfolded. When carefully analyzed, the tables tell a story of who the purged students were at the beginning of the purge, and who they were at its end, and why. We should notice that in composing his table, the statistician at the Tomsk Technological Institute used class categories only. The basic classes he operated with were manual laborers (“workers” and, significantly, not “peasants” but “land tillers”) and mental laborers (“employees” and “intelligentsia”). The “idle elements” he mentioned are intriguing. To understand what stood behind this catchall category we have to look at how things were done at the adjacent Tomsk State University. Here the list of the purged was detailed, Table 4 The Purge at Tomsk Technological Institute, 1924 Examined Workers from the bench Children of workers Land tillers Children of land tillers

Purged (%)

66

1 (01.5)

201

11 (05.4)

11 166

0 10 (06.0)

Employees

361

49 (13.6)

Children of employees

546

143 (26.2)

Intelligentsia Children of intelligentsia Artisans who do not exploit hired labor Children of artisans Idle elements

1 47 0 41 0

Children of idle elements

119

Party members

0 15 (32.0) 0 12 (29.3) 0 86 (72.3)

107

4 (03.7)

Komsomol members

85

1 (01.2)

Non-Party members

1,367

322 (23.6)

Source: PATO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –.



The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

and the occupations of the fathers of the purged were carefully listed. The list was long and included merchants, entrepreneurs, speculators, employees, members of the intelligentsia, professors, Cossacks, townspeople, priests, protodeacons, kulaks, factory owners, landowners, nobles, clerks, gymnasium directors, landlords, ship owners, mill owners, house managers, stewards, college counselors, surveyors, custom managers, hairdressers, honorary citizens, coffin makers, and a “locksmith who employs ten workers.” This list shows us not only the variety of the negative categories used during the purge in Tomsk but also the tendency to avoid class labels such as “exploiter,” “bourgeois,” or “former landowner” in the descriptions of the negative types, preferring estate terminology instead.¹²⁸ It was as if the Tomsk State University report, dealing with the “outs” alone, was saying that the tsarist social affiliations of their parents implicated some students in the old regime’s social hierarchy, which thus somehow justified their present sorry fate. Prerevolutionary estate categories remained in use in the Soviet Union at least until the  Constitution. Neither just a case of fluid social categories, nor one of statistical inconsistencies, this longevity provided the basis for purging some citizens while others were promoted. No strict methodology could be fashioned to separate the “estate” and the “class” components of Soviet statistics because classes were continually “in the making.” Under full-blown Communism, citizens were to be described only through favorable class categories. Meanwhile, every population breakdown was to signify that a process of purification was going on. So long as the transitional period lasted, the Bolshevik statistics were to contain references to the remnants of unfair social discrimination (estate categories) and to the skeleton of the future toiling society (class categories). Soviet identity was made or unmade depending on whether a student was described in the language of class or in that of estate. Bolshevik social statistics modeled the eschatological movement of history as the country was supposedly inexorably approaching the disappearance of exploited classes from the body politic. We should not read the academic purge statistics as if they were only reflecting reality. The role of the table as a mechanism that brought a new reality into being was no less important. It is mistaken, for example, to conclude from the class orientation of the Tomsk Technological Institute statistical reports that the children of nobles, merchants, or clergy were largely absent from its student body. Rather, the point seems to be that students could be framed as class aliens or as proletarians depending on which of their bio

              “               ”

graphical components were ignored and which affirmed. The Tomsk State University statistician, working in a place where class purity was a constant source of anxiety, tended to dwell on the negative aspects of students’ biographies, anxious that he would otherwise be blamed for covering up class aliens; this accounts for the profusion of estate categories in his documents. More confident of the purity of his student body, the Tomsk Technological Institute statistician portrayed it in the more favorable class terms. But—and this is crucial to my argument—had he so chosen, the Tomsk State University statistician could have whitewashed the identity of his students. Thus he could have ignored the past affiliation of the parents of the so-called children of idle elements altogether, searching instead for the present-day occupations of his students. In this scenario, the children of “nobles” and “clergy” would have metamorphosed into “doctors,” “engineers,” and so forth, all positively colored professional categories. Was a student categorized in estate terms or in class terms?—this was the key question. The former spelled denigration, the latter spelled survival and possibly success. Social historians who are naturally inclined to see the purging of a student as the automatic result of the student’s social position fail to realize that the mechanism could also work in the opposite direction—being purged could determine, to a certain extent, one’s social position. The statistical reports on the purge imply not that some students were “children of idle elements” and so tended to be purged, but that students who lost the political contest for an acceptable social identity found themselves relegated to the class alien category, after the fact. Notice that a number of  reports listed “kulaks,” “clergymen’s sons,” and “members of trading estates” among the purged; since no one could enroll at an institute with such adverse social identities we are obviously dealing here with cases of reclassification in the process of the purge itself.¹²⁹ Clearly, students could travel between social categories, and the purge was not only a process of sorting students into general class categories but also a process of reshaping these categories to suit individual cases. Shifts in class labels leap from the page when one compares the two sets of statistical data we have for the purge at Leningrad State University (see table ; note that the magnitude of the purge is rather unclear since the totals for the purged are dramatically inconsistent). The Party district committee distinguished between “social origins” and “social position,” carefully refraining from mixing “workers” with “children of workers” and “peasants” with “children of peasants.” This was done to tell a story: some of the toilers 

The Making of the “New Intelligentsia” Table 5 The Purge at Leningrad State University, 1924 Party Cell Data Examined Workers Children of workers Peasants Children of peasants Employees Children of employees Intelligentsia Children of intelligentsia Nobles

634

Purged (%) 36 (05.7)

— 669

— 80 (11.9)

— 2,073

— 592 (28.6)

— 789

— 201 (25.4)

— 569

Party District Committee Data

— 297 (52.1)

Examined

Purged

—

3

—

14

—

4

—

23

—

11

—

203

—

1

—

53

—

—

Teachers

—

—

—

—

11

Children of teachers

—

—

—

—

37

Artisans

—

—

—

—

1

Children of artisans

—

—

—

—

36

Children of clergy

—

—

—

—

10

Children of idle parents

—

—

—

—

31

Unknown social position

—

—

—

—

4

—

Unclear

—

—

Totals

4,734

1,206

—

9

—

451

Notes: Most probably the low number of  purged refers only to the students expelled in May  and omits the “dropouts” who were removed from the university lists earlier in the year. Dashes are inserted to indicate an absence of information in one source in comparison with the other. Source: TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —f., op. , d. , l. .

who had been purged deserved their fate because they had “degenerated” as a result of a separation from the proletarian milieu of their parents. The Party cell, by contrast, could not employ the same strategy as the Party district committee. Accounting not only for those purged but also for those retained, and bearing in mind that the university already had a bad class reputation, the Party cell feared that dividing the university’s small proletarian cohort into “proletarians” and “children of proletarians” would further taint the already problematic class profile of the students who had survived the purge. To render the expulsion of students more understandable from the point of view of class, the district committee added such nonproletarian categories 

              “               ”

as “teachers,” “artisans,” “children of clergy,” and “children of idle parents.” Facing the same necessity, the Party cell statistician opted for a different solution: the use of estate terms. Classifying a substantial part of the student body as “nobles” (a category noticeably absent from the Party district committee statistics, where students were categorized on the basis of their current occupations), the statistician effectively admitted the student body was aristocratic in profile. Be that as it may, the social identity of a given student at the beginning of the purge could hardly be taken as a strong indication of his odds of survival. No less than  percent of those purged were described as “nonproletarians,” but only in  percent of the cases was the label “socially alien” used to justify expulsion. The fact that almost every second noble was spared, as were two out of every three mental laborers, also suggests that class origins were not the only factor determining the outcome of the purge.¹³⁰ The foregoing does not mean, of course, that class identities were amenable to unrestricted manipulations or that they were therefore somehow meaningless. Quite the contrary: the Bolsheviks regarded class categorization as crucial to the constitution of the citizen’s persona and did not tolerate opaque class identity. A student’s initial social identity must at least have served as a point of departure for the work of the purge commission. It was equally true that students always left the commission’s office with a clearly defined class identity, old or new. Every alteration in the student’s class affiliation necessitated the production of a narrative incorporating his old identity, a story of “unmasking,” and an explanation of how the current class affiliation had been determined. My point here is not that class was a facade or a rhetoric that hid other agendas, but that class bore less sociological meaning than it did political meaning, and that therefore class categories were far more flexible than we tend to think. Class identity had a personal-redemptive significance and indicated whether the student was worthy of inheriting the land of milk and honey. Defending their proletarian credentials, students fought for a role in the eschatological movement, yearned to be described in positive class terms, and hoped to be diagnosed as fit to live in the future Communist society. Those who lost out were turned into the renegades of history, alien elements described in terms of the prerevolutionary estate categories, and were thrust out of the universities.



Classes Made and Unmade

5

THE MECHANICS of the student purges suggest that classes were ultimately made up of individuals whose class labels changed over time for a variety of reasons. My emphasis in this section will be on the fate of those individuals who were caught in the system and obliged both to think of themselves and to present themselves to others in class terms. If the relegation of a student to a particular class category was not a function of his immutable social essence but the result of a struggle, a class trial, one may begin to speak of the elaboration of Bolshevik politics and the poetics of identity. Positive class affiliation was a matter of the student’s ability to defend, in a set of ritualized procedures, his claim to membership in the proletariat. By concentrating below on the poetics of student letters of denunciation and their reinstatement appeals, I shall attempt to lay out the rules to be followed in the construction of the proletarian biography. I make no claim that the cases discussed below are in any way representative. Rather, a methodology that has been advanced by Natalie Zemon Davis is taken as a model. Once a member of the group of “scientific historians” trained “to peel away the fictive elements in our documents so we could get at the real facts,” Davis preferred, in her study of sixteenth-century French letters of remission, to allow her membership to lapse and “let the ‘fictional’ aspect of these documents be the center of analysis.” Her emphasis on the fictional is not a focus on “feigned elements, but rather, using the other and broader sense of the root word fingere, their forming, shaping, and molding elements: the crafting of a narrative.”¹ What choices of detail, expression, and order were required of the sort of account that would seem to both writer and reader to 

   

be meaningful, true, and explanatory? Seeking “fiction in the archives,” I want to know how students told the story of who they were; how their stories varied according to their narrators and their audience; and how the rules for the construction of class identity interacted with wider Bolshevik habits of description and evaluation. The interaction between the politics and the poetics of the discourse of class can be compared to the workings of a kaleidoscope. The picture that emerges within the kaleidoscope is rich and complex but at the same time very susceptible to manipulation. The smallest of adjustments can produce the most radical of transformations. The instrument permits the creation of a range of configurations, each one unique and self-contained. All of this, it seems to me, is close to the poetics of class and the different interpretations of what constitutes class identity in student argument. The question of who controls the kaleidoscope and what picture is projected brings us nearer to the politics of the class discourse. The one who grasps the wheels of the instrument is the one who pronounces what configuration will be displayed on the public board. The student who holds the kaleidoscope must project a picture for others to see and judge. He is free to change the picture and to argue for a particular configuration, to assert that the picture describes the proper interpretation of the class matrix. Usually, the picture he chooses presents his class physiognomy in the best light. But if the class configuration displayed by the student is contested, his detractor will seize the instrument, spin its wheels again, and produce a different picture. The new picture will advance the one who now holds the kaleidoscope to a privileged position, pushing its previous holder into the place of class alien. Thinking of the mechanism of the purges as kaleidoscopic helps capture the interplay of the element of constraint and the element of freedom in any student’s choice of a class identity. All of this pushes us to the question, What did class identity mean during NEP? I want to build here on the principal claim made in the previous chapters, namely that classes should be understood as ethico-messianic concepts. Marxism acknowledged only two basic classes: “the good” and “the bad.” The former was the exploited proletariat, the latter the exploiting bourgeoisie. At the end of time, the Bolsheviks believed, history would separate the good from the bad. The Revolution was a crucial step in that direction. The Revolution’s great accomplishments, namely the crystallization of the proletariat and its Party vanguard, were secured under the Dictatorship of 

Classes Made and Unmade

the Proletariat. Having said this, however, the Bolsheviks hastened to add that few citizens had reached the full light of Communism. To the Bolsheviks’ chagrin, NEP had sheltered relics of capitalism in the country, contaminating the souls of many proletarians. Before Communism was fully realized, it was always to be the case that individuals with distilled, clear-cut class identities would be hard to come by. Bolshevik class analysis acknowledged a whole spectrum of classes, with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as only two extremes. The result was a wide array of impure entities, subclasses (“peasants,” “old intelligentsia,” “artisans,” “merchants,” and so on), some closer to the proletariat, others closer to the bourgeoisie. Each of the citizens of the proletarian republic claimed a certain degree of purity. In practical terms, this meant a choice from a menu of class identities offered by the Bolshevik class spectrum, a choice that had to be proclaimed within the public sphere. The closer to the proletariat the better, provided the self-styled identification could be defended within the political rituals used to adjudicate claims. At the various stages of the purge process, students made a sustained effort to improve their position on the ladder of purity. “Merchants” tried to reclassify themselves as “intelligentsia,” “intelligentsia” as “toilers,” “peasants” as “workers,” and so on. Did students manipulate the Bolshevik discourse for their own benefit? Everything, I suggest, depends on what “benefit” means. An entire historiographical tradition assumes that historical actors always want the same things. Isaiah Berlin summarized the credo of this tradition: “The only reality is to be found in the individual and his . . . permanent cravings for food, shelter, power, sexual satisfaction, social recognition and so on.” This desire can be “repressed and rationalized by a series of intellectual subterfuges,” but it can never change.² The historians Berlin is talking about remain adamant that an authentic subject must be unearthed, because he must have been present. They are convinced that if we dig deep enough we will find that every Soviet student pursued these mundane, eternal goals. According to this argument, students, “oppressed” as they were by Bolshevik power and “forced to employ” Bolshevik discourse, sought to maximize their self-interests. But can one not say, with equal conviction, that many students actually believed in the Communist emancipation and strove to participate in its realization? In this case, they would still have been manipulating the Bolshevik discourse, but this time 

   

not in order to achieve goals different from those prescribed by the Marxist eschatology but rather in the hope of being numbered among the messiahs. This problem raises the issue of the relation of the author to the text. Who is the subject and who the object in this relation has long been a preoccupation of literary critics. Recently, this issue has become the center of a heated debate among historians as well. Reminding us that intentions cannot exist outside of language, David Harlan rejects the image of a writer who stands outside his own universe of discourse, even as he manipulates the discourse: “This longing for the author’s presence—a presence that seems to shimmer just beneath the surface of the text but a presence that is, in fact, always deferred, always elsewhere, always already absent—it is this yearning for the communion with the author’s self that recent developments in literary criticism and the history of discourse have brought powerfully into question.”³ The Bolshevik subject was not merely the producer of the Bolshevik discourse but also its product. I see no reason to introduce a preexistent subject who cynically manipulates the Bolshevik discourse; it seems equally valid to argue that the Bolshevik discourse molded students into persons who identified themselves in terms of class. Those inclined to protest that in the texts I analyze students were “insincere,” that the records reflect only how a student was “coerced” to present himself, and not what he actually understood himself to be, must assume that there is a true Self hiding behind its public manifestations. Perhaps. Yet, how is one to establish its existence? Do we not risk unearthing one layer of “fabricated” subjectivity after another ad infinitum? It seems to me that the term “fabrication” has to go, unless what we mean by it is “construction,” the fact that identities are never given, but always culturally produced. The same point can be rephrased as a methodological plea: Since the tools of the historian cannot be applied to anything beyond discourse, and discourse always implies some sort of a public interaction, there is no way whereby the historian can investigate the “authentic” subject even if he insists on presupposing his existence. When historians look for the “authentic” they look for the impossible. If they find anything at the end of the tunnel, it is a mere refraction of their own selves, not of the other self they set out to study. Any subject, in “articulating” or “expressing” its identity, resorts to discourse, thereby “tarnishing” itself with the publicly mediated, the “externally imposed,” and ultimately, the “unauthentic.” The loss of authenticity is necessary, not accidental. The “authentic,” “power-free” subject appears to 

Classes Made and Unmade

be a mythical subject. The postulation of a “repressed subject” acting on the Bolshevik historical scene only precludes us from examining the contemporary reality on its own terms. A transcendental entity, such a subject ultimately introduces an ahistorical dimension into the investigation. I do not assume the existence of a problematic fusion of identity and discourse, according to which the author’s discourse expresses, more or less accurately, his real, authentic self. Nor do I postulate an equally problematic radical separation between identity and discourse that presents the author as constantly dissimulating, manipulating a construction that has been imposed on him from outside. Rather, I seek to explore the “epistemological context” within which the new self was produced. The forces that shaped the student self did not necessarily operate from top to bottom (the approach of the totalitarian school), or from bottom to top (reflecting the revisionist emphasis on social support and resistance), but existed instead within a field of play delimited by a changing set of beliefs and practices. In the act of self-narration, the barrier between narrated self and narrating self broke down. As they set their life stories to paper, students were not only creating themselves but were creating in the act of being created. The perception of the self as both author and product obviates the need to establish the veracity of the autobiographical account, its correspondence to the life it purports to describe. Without discourse there could be no subjectification. The meaning the student gave to his life cannot be separated from the social mechanisms of power, because these mechanisms constituted the subject, imbuing it with a worldview, interests, fears—everything that made the subject what it was. Thus we do not have to regard the Bolshevik discourse of class as merely coercive; it can also be seen as productive. The Bolshevik discourse had real effects. As it structured all activities under the Soviet regime, it instilled the subject with rules (which were, of course, power mechanisms) and created the meanings by which the citizens lived. The student purge delved into the class essence of Soviet society. As students raised their voices in claims and counterclaims to social identity, the public arena became a battleground whose clashes resonated with the intensity endemic to the Marxist public sphere. The Bolsheviks claimed that the very distinction between the public and the private was nothing but a capitalist fetish; capitalist social relations broke society into atoms, erected the myth of the individual in his private domain, and veiled the fact that production, the basis of society, was in fact a collective and not an individual 

   

endeavor. Marx claimed that only the identification of private with public life, the political with the social sphere, makes emancipation possible: “The conscious absorption of society by the individual, the free recognition by each individual of himself as bearer of the community is . . . the way in which man rediscovers and returns to himself.”⁴ Inspired by this analysis, the Bolsheviks declared private matters open to public scrutiny. Students were called on to meddle in the affairs of their “comrades” and to pronounce judgments on every aspect of their behavior. This is why much of the purge process took place in public. Various agencies were expected to express their opinions on students under investigation. The director of the Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers attested to the public character of the purge: “Everybody was asked to forward written denunciations of those who they believed had no place in the workers’ faculty. Interrogation took place in group meetings where denunciations were read aloud and cross-examinations took place.” Student “testimony” (the Russian “pokazaniia” has the same legal connotation as the English word “testimony”) was compared with the questionnaires and other documents stored in the school archive. “All of the scrutinized students were placed under oath and forced to swear that they would tell only the truth. Otherwise, they were to be indicted under such and such article of law with such and such consequences.” The purge was conducted like a trial whose aim was the establishment of a correct class identity. Students were expected to provide veracious and complete testimony about their social and political past. “You must be restrained, ethical, and most important, sincere. Do not try to pull the wool over the commission’s eyes. Imagine that you are in a confessional.”⁵ The poetics of the student’s biographical narrative was inseparable from its politics, and the narrator had to anticipate and preempt potential counternarratives aimed at repudiating his self-proclaimed “proletarian face.” Many stories did in fact succumb to counternarratives. A communiqué sent to university boards of administration in  stated that “cases have been recorded in which students have given false information about their social origins, public activities and academic records.” The purge troika in Leningrad province expelled all students who had submitted any misleading data. In Siberia, students caught lying were pronounced “candidates suitable for purging under clause  as counterrevolutionaries.” Omsk Agricultural Institute stated:



Classes Made and Unmade in many cases it was found that information provided by students in questionnaires did not correspond to what was written in the official files. Concealment of social origins and of volunteer service in the White Army was recorded several times at our institute and numerous letters of recommendation proved to be unreliable. A Kolchak-volunteer who hid behind the authority of a Communist was exposed upon the detection of an incriminating document in a personnel dossier.

In a separate case, a student had obtained a recommendation from a Red Army veteran. The latter declared, “I know the guy as a result of our common service in the White Army and remember his hatred for Kolchak.” The student in question, however, turned out to have been a Kolchak volunteer. Indictments could be served to those who substantiated the fallacious reports, just as they could be to those who had attempted a deception. Examples abound of provincial departments hastily revoking recommendations after the purge commission “had exposed the true identity of their protégés.”⁶ Denunciations were seen neither as ignoble betrayals of colleagues nor as personal affairs but as the duty of every conscientious citizen; society had to be warned of the undermining of its integrity. Not that the negative meaning of denunciation was completely foreign to Bolshevik discourse. There were special words to describe unfounded accusations, such as “libel” (donos) or “slander” (kliauza). The negative connotation of those words arose from their tendency to provoke “squabbles” (skloki)—discords that could undermine the collective. What is important, however, is that denunciations coming from proletarians—the messianic agents supposedly incapable of ulterior motives—were not seen as a source of internal strife but as a remedy to it. As suspicion of falsified identities was widespread, individuals, groups, and institutions were encouraged to provide damaging material about “counterfeit proletarians.” The appeal made by the Leningrad State University Party cell in April  bespoke this approach: “In view of the importance of the purge, every conscientious individual is obliged to participate in its conduct. Tell us who you think has no place in our university!”⁷ All in good measure, of course. Omsk Agricultural Institute authorities complained that they had received too many unfounded denunciations: “More often than not the expressed desire to eject this or that student was not supported by any hard facts. We said loudly and clearly from the very beginning that documentation is indispensable if a denunciation is to be



   

taken seriously.” The institute’s board of administration laid the blame for the torrent of false denunciations at the feet of the local Party cell, which “superficially prepared the public for the purge.” Accused by the Communist students of failing to follow up on their tips, the rector revealed a strictly confidential directive from the Siberian Party organization instructing him “to refrain from purging academically successful students without adequately substantiated material.” During the Civil War Lenin had proposed that those who made false denunciations be shot (December ). Three years later the Sovnarkom promulgated a decree “On Punishments for False Denunciations” that made a deliberate false denunciation punishable by two years in prison.⁸ Many took to heart the task of denouncing class aliens. Consider the case of Nemchinova, ousted from the Tomsk Technological Institute during the  purge because “despite being a third-year student she had completed only half of the academic requirements.” As the case unfolded it became apparent that there was more to the case than schoolwork. Nemchinova was in fact condemned because of the “manifold denunciations against her.” One such denunciation submitted by a Communist, a certain Solonikin, was particularly damaging: In her questionnaire Nemchinova reports that she is the “daughter of a laborer.” The truth of the matter is that she is a nobleman’s child. Nemchinova’s mother is the daughter of a major Russian factory owner who had married into a particularly illustrious family. Her father does not live in his former residence anymore. He cohabits with a new wife in Novonikolaevsk, where he has a lucrative post. Nemchinova has continued to receive money from her father until this day. Nemchinova’s brother was also a student in Tomsk but he was purged because he had served in Kolchak’s army. Later he was readmitted. Another brother finished Real Schule and somehow procured himself a position in the chancery of the workers’ faculty. Nemchinova herself graduated from high school before entering the institute. Under the conditions of Soviet Power the Nemchinovs lost a great deal of property. In essence, their life came to resemble the life of the common folk. The student’s mother had to work in the years – sewing bedclothes. This explains Nemchinova’s miraculous transformation from a noblewoman into a “worker’s daughter.” . . . When faced with the threat of a purge, Nemchinova, like all nobles, tries to befriend Communists and obtain good recommendations. . . . In the early days of May, chemistry students organized a party to which the head of our chemistry faculty, the Communist Loginov, 

Classes Made and Unmade was invited. He suspected a trap and as a serious and honest Communist turned the invitation down. The Communist Bal’din, on the other hand, could not resist the charms of an attractive female with refined noble origins and gave Nemchinova a pompous recommendation on which basis she was accepted to the institute.

Having established the student’s undesirable class background (noble social origins, material dependence on the family, liberal sexual mores, tsarist elite high school education), Solonikin then described the inevitable behavior supposedly dictated by such a background: “The entire Nemchinov household curses Soviet Power. I have heard Nemchinova literally saying: ‘Feeee. What filth! What muck! These wretched little Communists souls!’ ” Naturally, Nemchinova had to miss the old days, a time when she could study freely. “Disgruntled with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, such a student has no right to remain in a proletarian institute.” On May , , Nemchinova began her defense by answering the claim that she had performed poorly in school. In my first year at the institute I barely had any money and it was only in the second year that I was awarded a stipend. The third year was particularly difficult because my mother lost her job at the communal laundry and fell ill. Still, with no money, I fulfilled  percent of the requirements this year. Anyhow, how can anyone call me an “eternal student” if I am only nineteen?

A month later Nemchinova attempted to challenge the social charges by providing the authorities with letters supporting her proletarian class identity. A trade union in Novonikolaevsk portrayed her as an “active public worker who invests time in the union’s cultural committees, does public work at school and contributes to the liquidation of illiteracy.” Further testimony came from the secretary of the First Union of Tomsk who recommended her as “ideologically suitable for a Soviet university, a student who cannot possibly do any harm to the proletariat.” But in the end Nemchinova’s purge was ratified. Barely mentioning academic troubles, the final verdict was based on additional denunciatory materials to the effect that “Nemchinova’s cast of mind is definitely alien to Soviet power. Nemchinova is religious, she attends church and she rejects Communist organizations.”⁹ Individuals could even be denounced for refraining from denouncing others. A cursory investigation was initiated by an anonymous letter to the Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers authorities in  stating 

   

that “your student, Furman, had to know that his friend, Pukhovitskii, had concealed his social origins—the two come from the same Jewish settlement —but he did nothing.” The investigation revealed that () when filling out the workers’ faculty questionnaire, Pukhovitskii had put “worker” as his social position though on his Komsomol card he had chosen “no main profession”; () Pukhovitskii’s father once owned a grocery store. The purge commission concluded that Furman had abetted the petit bourgeois interloper, and to add insult to injury, that he had entered the workers’ faculty on false premises himself. “Furman lied when he stated that he had worked for three years in a blacksmith’s shop.”¹⁰ The Bolsheviks hoped that class-vigilant workers would inject a proletarian approach into the work of the checkup commissions. The core assumption that industrial workers were especially skilled at reading student souls explains why governmental instructions placed them above professors and students alike in matters of class diagnostics. The same epistemological hierarchy was replicated on the institutional level: proletarian organizations were considered better vouchers for class identity than boards of administration, and Communist organizations were best of all. This was important when conflicting recommendations had to be weighted and acted on. Many university purge commissions were headed by “conscious representatives of the proletariat.” Having announced that the local purge commission would include, alongside students and professors, workers from the bench, the dean of Leningrad Institute of Peoples’ Economy, Korablev, went on to comment that: “You may wonder why workers who have nothing to do with the institute are involved in the purge. The reason for it, comrades, is that workers with a true proletarian spirit and uniquely keen noses will immediately sense whether a student is cut out for the tasks the proletariat sets up for him.” One such worker tried to calm anxious students with the following advice: “Comrades, do not plunge into excessive self-criticism. Do not fear you have too little in common with the proletariat. We workers can judge for ourselves who you really are.”¹¹ The belief that workers could easily distinguish between truth and lies is reflected in the poetics of the denunciation letter; the author typically assumed a proletarian voice while the targeted individual was framed as a proletarian impostor. The following anonymous denunciation, sent to the Komsomol cell at Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers, is suggestive in this regard. “I work as a locksmith in the main metal workshop and it is 

Classes Made and Unmade

there that I met your student Preis. Production can do without engineers like him. We need experts from our own class.” The bulk of the text was dedicated to dismantling the proletarian credentials of the student. “After two years as an apprentice in the workshop Preis let it be known that he is a worker. He must have forged his documents to make such a claim. This is a creepy fellow who joined the Komsomol only in order to get ahead. Purge him!”¹² It is true that many denunciations were signed by “workers,” but this should be understood not so much as an index of the social position of their authors as evidence of a widespread conviction that the members of the classmessiah were best positioned to unmask students’ true class physiognomies. The denunciation that was sent to the Party cell at Leningrad State University by a certain Petrov was animated by class-war rhetoric and described students as the long-standing enemies of the working class: I am a simple worker and have no personal stake in the affairs of your university. A buddy of mine told me all about that. When the war started several students who wanted shining new shoulderstraps enrolled in the officers’ courses. They acquired a taste for beating our folk. Now, they are taking our places at the university. This is not right. It is better to put more worthy ones in their place. Nepotism [kumovstvo] is a disgrace in Soviet Russia. . . . Among your students there are officers who fought against Soviet Power and Kronstadt traitors, not to mention the Orenburg machine gunners who covered Martyshkino [a field in the vicinity of Leningrad] with the bodies of about a thousand of our folk. . . . Away with the old students who victimize our youth! You can catch them easily by sifting through the questionnaires.¹³

But even “workers’” denunciations were not immune from scrutiny and had to be reinforced with all the relevant testimonies and certificates. Upon receiving a letter that presented Sergeev, a student at Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers, as a “class alien,” the local cell requested corroborating information. Sergeev was purged only after Party authorities in his hometown invoked Breughelesque images of a triumphant Dance of Death, describing how “Sergeev’s father—a former big kulakmerchant—made money from peasant moans when famine reigned on the Volga.” In a similar case a Petrograd student, Berelevich, was denounced as the “son of a capitalist who lives solely on interest and who used to travel extensively abroad before the war. Dreaming of a diploma, Berelevich found a 

   

warm place in a proletarian educational institution. Expel him!” Although seriously alarmed, the local Komsomol cell did not act before it had requested from its brother organization in Trobchevsk County additional detail about “the background and present occupation of the Berelevich family.” Only after a detailed inquiry revealed that “during the hard years of the Revolution, when most of the local population starved, nothing of the kind could be said of Samuel Berelevich; he experienced no hardship,” was the cell satisfied that Berelevich was indeed a “creeper.”¹⁴ In some cases, documentation might traverse enormous distances. When the Party cell of Ural University sent a memorandum to Leningrad Mining Institute in  to inform the institute that two of its students, Lobanov and Grum-Grimailo, had “counterrevolutionary attitudes,” the local Party organization circulated the letter among all Leningrad educational institutions. To have acted otherwise would have meant the risk of earning a reputation for covering up material against anti-Bolshevik elements. Thus interrogations in one part of the country might well track down students who thought they were safe far from the original locale of their misdeeds.¹⁵ Although a student under investigation might not be informed of a denunciation, the attacks were so common they were taken for granted. Bagishev, a student at Omsk Medical Institute, deduced that a denunciation against him must have been the motive for his purge: Since I have impeccable class origins—my father is a carpenter—I realize that politically motivated denunciation stands behind my expulsion. I am unaware of a single anti-Soviet let alone counterrevolutionary act I have committed since , and am sure I have been libeled. I demand an inquiry into the juridical viability of my expulsion. My denouncer has to be prosecuted.¹⁶

It is remarkable that Bagishev was denouncing an individual whose existence he was only guessing at. If a defense was to be successful it had to involve such counterdenunciations. Since Bolsheviks believed that every belief could be reduced to the class interest of the agent expressing that belief, it was only logical to conclude that a false accusation was a crime perpetrated by the class enemy who had to be exposed. Bagishev could demand a “face-to-face confrontation” (ochnaia stavka) with his denouncer—a ceremony that brought the two sides together in the presence of witnesses and an arbitrator. The latter, usually a worker or a Communist, was invested with full authority over the verdict. 

Classes Made and Unmade

The outcome of the battle between the detractors and the benefactors depended on the reception of the original denunciatory letter by the purge commission. If the detractor had made a convincing case in his accusation, his letter was deemed truthful and he was declared a “conscious proletarian.” Conversely, if his charges were overturned, the detractor stood the risk of emerging as a class alien, his letter automatically classified as unjustified bourgeois “libel.” A good number of denunciations were rejected during the  purge. When the accused student learned that his attacker had written: “Vavilov is bourgeois, politically disloyal and in sympathy with the old regime,” he issued a prompt and skillful rebuttal: “I had shared the same living space with my main detractor, Koptsov, who is now trying to take vengeance on me. Koptsov’s credibility vanishes once you are aware that he is presently under arrest, this time for libel against the state, not an individual.” Displaying rhetorical brilliance Vavilov offhandedly put himself and the proletarian state on the same side of the class barricade, his denouncer on the other. He went on to note that “I never spoke in favor of the tsar. As far as my so-called bourgeois spirit goes, let me tell you that I am a peasant by origin and have never severed ties with my native village.” Having also produced a certificate from his local soviet—“this document, issued for the institute’s purge commission, ascertains that your student maintains ties with his native village of Vtesheva in Tver province and his household pays taxes diligently”—Vavilov was cleared of all charges.¹⁷ No less impressive was the counterattack staged by another student denounced in Leningrad, Iarotskoi. The case went back and forth, both sides seeking support wherever they could find it. On this occasion, however, it was the detractors who celebrated at the end. The first set of accusations had maintained that Iarotskoi is a Polish nobleman. During the years of the tsarist reaction his father was the head of the city of Nismishe. Iarotskoi confessed before me that he sympathizes with the Kadet Party and added that after graduation he plans to emigrate to Poland. He regularly corresponds with this country and in  he reportedly received ten dollars from abroad. His brother was an investigator in Denikin’s army.

This denunciation, signed with the pseudonym Zhuk (“bug”), was followed shortly by a sequel: “Had Iarotskoi had the means, no Zhid [Jew] would have been left alive. He said that under Nicholas life had been much better 

   

than it is under Soviet rule. Politically, Iarotskoi is a totally foreign element who has nothing to say to the worker and in whose mind the needs of the Soviet economy play no role.” Once he had been familiarized with the content of the denunciatory letter, Iarotskoi denied both the social and the political charges: My peasant origins will be proven by a certificate my parents will send me from Poland. . . . My brothers alternate between work and study. I used to plough while my eldest brother studied. . . . My denouncers say I committed anti-Soviet deeds. Besides some idle talk, exaggerated a thousand times over, what proof do they have? I have done nothing wrong. People gave me the nickname “Pan” [“master” in Polish], but does that really mean that I am a Polish nobleman?

The denunciations of Iarotskoi and his exemplary letter were compared with each other by the purge commission. Conducting an inquiry of its own, the commission found an old questionnaire that contained the following biographical details: “Iarotskoi was born in , of Polish nationality, a onetime student at the Kiev gymnasium; his parents were artisans and land tillers before  and peasants afterwards.” The new information appeared to corroborate the defendant’s proletarian social origins. Yet, additional documentation turned up, reversing the commission’s inclination. This was a school report that “Iarotskoi had no dispatch to the institute, never worked in production or ever served in the Red Army” and that “presently he shows no interest in student or public life.” Iarotskoi was purged as somebody “totally inept for work in production and politically dangerous.”¹⁸ While many denunciations depicted students as class aliens, some had more to say about political issues than others. Consider the following anonymous denunciation sent to the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute: According to trustworthy sources, your student Patkin comes from a rich Vitebsk bourgeois family. He managed to obtain admission through contacts that provided him with a document indicating that he worked as a night guard. Patkin maintains the appearance of a proletarian by wearing a worker’s coat, boots and other such things. He hides his fancy garments in the apartments of his friends.¹⁹

Sticking to blaming a student for dissimulating a proletarian identity and not being “one of us” (ne nash), the scope of this denunciation was restricted to the social theme alone. 

Classes Made and Unmade

Generally, however, the detractor accomplished only half the task if he failed to explain in what ways class origins manifested themselves politically. A more inclusive denunciation against Lobotskoi, a student at the Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers, also opened with the claim that the student was a class alien. But this denunciation soon moved on to the political convictions of the accused. The text was a laundry list of negative traits a student could be accused of: First, as a Pole, he is, in social terms, not one of our own. We often found ourselves wondering about Lobotskoi’s views on contemporary events . . . and about his attitude toward fellow students. Second, he believes that the current agricultural tax is a form of extortion. As an example he is given to citing an incident in his country in which a peasant was allegedly put in jail and his cattle requisitioned only because he had failed to pay his taxes. Lobotskoi thinks that the conditions in which peasants now live are incomparably worse than under the “bloody Nikolai.” Third, in a moment of candidness, Lobotskoi admitted that he used to produce home-distilled vodka which he then sold for a profit. . . . Fourth, in his view, “Communism cannot be a living thing. Physiological, moral and psychological differences between people stand in the way.” . . . For Lobotskoi, Communism is an “improbable and impractical sweet illusion.” He claims that “when all is said and done, the power of workers and peasants rests on bayonets, not on free will and enthusiasm.”²⁰

The two Communists who signed this denunciation arranged their accusation as a loose chain of deductions: his association with NEP speculators meant that Lobotskoi could not be a proletarian. No wonder he did not believe in the economic policies of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and entertained heretical thoughts, such as that Communism was a transitory and unsustainable form of social organization. A key Marxist truism was thus reaffirmed: one’s politics stems from one’s economics. Should a student’s biography focus on the social or the political aspect of his life? Oftentimes the battle between the denouncer and the denounced revolved precisely around this issue. The identity of a student at Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers named Temkin vacillated between “class alien” and “revolutionary hero,” depending on which aspect of his biography was emphasized. One version centered on his petit bourgeois origins while the other centered on his Bolshevik accomplishments. Although Temkin passed unscathed through the purge of , a few years later the in

   

stitute received a number of letters denouncing him, signed by various authorities living in Temkin’s native Jewish settlement. Alleging that Temkin’s family was disenfranchised, the denunciations buttressed their case with an array of testimonies accusing the student of forging his proletarian class identity. The letter by a certain Til’ was as poignant as it was succinct: “Temkin studies in your institute and enjoys a stipend. The son of a rich merchant, he does not deserve such fine treatment. Details on his social profile can be obtained from Comrade Gortsuev, a worker in the Putilov factory.” Not only was Temkin presented as bourgeois, but an irrefutable authority, a Putilovets, substantiated this accusation. Another anonymous letter included additional damaging details: Temkin’s father lives in a Jewish settlement called Drybino. Before the Revolution he was one of the biggest wholesale merchants, with his own warehouses and stores. Since , he has returned to trade. At present the Temkins have a large wooden house, a stone building which was a shop before the revolution, a granary and a barn. The family occupies only two rooms in the house; and the rest are rented out. Temkin has no voting rights. During the recent purge of the local soviets our poor were enraged that the son of a rich merchant is studying in a Soviet university.

The case made in Temkin’s defense was no less striking. His benefactor, Chudakov, took some of the sting out of the accusations by informing the Party Control Commission that in his original application to the workers’ faculty Temkin was sincere about his social position. It was only upon entering the regular university that Temkin omitted the information about the nonproductive income of his parents, and he did so with clean conscience. True, his parents rented out part of their house, but that was done out of dire need. They sublet all of the main rooms and live in the kitchen.

Trainin, another benefactor and relative of the accused, inverted the contents of the denunciation, attributing to Temkin a glorious revolutionary past: I had already arrived in the village of Drybino in . As a result I have been familiar with the Temkin family for twelve long years. It is my duty to provide the board of administration with certain details. . . . As a military commissar in Drybino I witnessed the extreme poverty of the Jewish settlement. To do something about it I organized an agricultural commune. Its first 

Classes Made and Unmade member was the fifteen-year-old Temkin. After my departure, the commune was divided into collective farms in one of which Temkin worked for five years (–). He then joined the army. Released because of health problems in  he joined the workers’ faculty and the Komsomol.

Having completed Temkin’s glorious revolutionary biography, Trainin moved on to the subject of the defendant’s suspected social origins: It is true that his mother engaged in trade before . Never having been rich, however, Temkin’s parents were attacked by a counterrevolutionary gang after the revolution and cleaned out. Moreover, the entire family was wounded by a bomb thrown into the apartment. This raid was organized as revenge against me (I was married to Temkin’s sister)—back then I was the head of a battalion struggling against banditry. The attack on Temkin and the torrent of denunciations he faces should be understood as a local squabble motivated by jealousy against a guy who has made it on his own. The revocation of his parents’ voting rights results from the unique conditions of White Russia, which is a former Pale of Settlement. Once suffocating under tsarist authoritarianism and lawlessness, it was inhabited by a Jewry that was primarily engaged in small trade. A formalistic approach to class definition led to the present situation in which suffrage is denied to almost  percent of the local population. Are these reasons sufficient to deny a future proletarian expert the right to finish his education?

Trainin’s letter was a valiant attempt to forge a revolutionary out of a class alien. The key charge—dubious economic activities of the family prior to —was played down and emphasis was placed instead on the revolutionary development of Temkin, a consideration missed by those who applied class analysis dogmatically. Trainin portrayed Temkin as a conscious revolutionary who had joined Bolshevik social (commune) and political (Komsomol) organizations long before the victory of the Reds was secure. Since radical politics and bourgeois social origins were an oxymoron Temkin could not be alien to Soviet Power. Only after profusely glorifying his proletarian spirit, did the narrator address the family background of his protégé. Trainin was obviously aware that this was the most delicate part of his argument. The hurdle was overcome by the suggestion that standard tools of class analysis should be adjusted to the particularities of each region. With the Jewish settlement as the case in point, Trainin proposed that a population’s class affiliation should not be dogmatically derived from general axioms. Temkin was reinstated in the institute.²¹ 

   

The Poetics of Class Identity More than half the students purged by the local committee exercised the right to remonstrate against the local decision at a higher level.²² Many of these appeals have been preserved in Narkompros files. Although the information they contain can only rarely be verified against outside sources and although the final outcomes are often absent, some of these materials are very intriguing. This tends to be true of the most eloquent and carefully crafted of the appeals, where the text can be read as inverted denunciations. While the denunciations portrayed the protagonist as a class alien and the letters of appeal portrayed him as a proletarian, both genres adopted similar sorts of Bolshevik poetics. In the ensuing presentation I have labored to focus on the poetic maneuvers students employed to embellish identity. I open with a discussion of texts negotiating social origins and move toward cases involving issues of political loyalty. While I have divided student appeals into subgenres (the appeals of class aliens, of peasants, of workers, and finally of the politically alien), this fragmentation should not obscure the uniformity in the poetics of the supplication genre. The commonality of the students’ task—to show they were loyal to the regime and deserved a place in its university—introduced a high degree of uniformity in the narrative strategies they employed. Besides, even within the subgenres there were significant differences concerning what described (and constituted) a member of this or that social category (social origins, occupation, level of political consciousness, and so on), so that further divisions and subclassifications within each subgenre are possible. Many of the students purged in  had been unmasked as “class aliens” who “muddle through in the squalid social milieu,” a milieu at times described more specifically as the “philistine swamp” or the “noble swamp.” The explanations recorded besides the names of the expelled in the purge commission rolls pointed to disenfranchised parentage that had obliged the student to conceal in his questionnaire that “his father was a police officer,” “that he owns a house in the city,” that he is “propelled by the spirit of commerce,” and so forth.²³ Class-alien students were described as having gone beyond the limits of social acceptability. The appeals of class aliens were usually apologetic in tone. The accused admitted to having less than ideal fam-



Classes Made and Unmade

ily backgrounds but hoped to pass the threshold of Bolshevik acceptability and to be allowed to continue their studies. Most appeals fell into one of three main categories: the claim that the class history imputed to them did not correspond to reality; the claim that social characteristics cannot be hereditary in a correct interpretation of the principles of class; and the claim that the harsh economic conditions of the old regime had forced their parents into nonproletarian occupations. In most cases, students who stood to be purged as “class aliens” denied responsibility for their parents’ socioeconomic station. Judge us by what we are now, they beseeched the purge commission, because present occupation and not family origins shape our worldview. Purged from Tomsk Technological Institute as an “academic failure,” a certain Nakhmanovich quickly rebutted the official reason for his expulsion by showing that he had met Narkompros’s academic standards. A few lines into his letter he was already addressing what he believed to be the real reason for his expulsion—his family’s background in trade. I would not and have not concealed the fact that my origins are not proletarian. It is true that my father had a trading business in our village before . But at present my father works in the millers’ cooperative which allows him a monthly income of only – puds of flour. He no longer speculates. In the past, when Father had a business, he had no employees. All the work was done by himself.

Following the dictates of the genre, the supplicant granted that trade and speculation were synonymous, but he hedged by declaring that renting a mill had turned his father from an exploiter into a laborer. Then, somewhat abruptly, Nakhmanovich shifted the grounds of his defense. No longer apologizing, he rejected the relevance of family background altogether: “Am I to be responsible for my social origins?” Nakhmanovich beseeched Narkompros to notice that “I was dispatched to the institute by the Red Army where I had served for two years as a propagandist in the Department of Agitation and Enlightenment.” Excusing his father as best as he could and at the same time trying to separate himself from his family, Nakhmanovich concluded that “I have the right to be considered a proletarian student.”²⁴ Riumin, who was purged from Leningrad Mining Institute as an “alien element,” added some unusual refinements to that part of the plea where the



   

supplicant claimed he should not be responsible for what his parents had done in the past: You must be weighing the social position of my father’s two brothers quite heavily. Let me assure you that I severed my ties with my father long ago and that my stepmother only aggravated the animosity between us. I have never been introduced to one of my father’s brothers. The other one I do know slightly because he helped me when I had no money to buy food. This brother of my father is innocent because he never went against the workers but bonded with them when trade unions were formed.

On a first reading, Riumin’s reference to what he called “the brothers of my father” seems bizarre; a regular reading of his family tree would have rendered them “uncles.” The supplicant was making a profound effort to separate himself from his nonproletarian family by avoiding the standard kinship ties and thus underlining, by an odd semantic device, his break with his father. In writing that “throughout my life I have circulated in the workers’ milieu,” Riumin further stressed his independent class identity.²⁵ The purge commission at the Tomsk Technological Institute explicitly stated that Rastrenin deserved to be expelled from the institute because he was the “son of a merchant.” This supplicant defended his proletarian reputation by arguing that accidental circumstances had led his father astray and that deep down inside his father was a man who had relied on himself for a living. Hard labor and not the exploitation of others had been his formative life experience: Now sixty years old, my father has served in all kinds of institutions. He started at the age of fifteen as a small clerk, gradually working his way up to the position of accountant. Having lost his health in the Russo-Japanese War he temporarily forfeited his ability for chancery work. Unable to rely on his scant savings alone (though it had taken him twenty-six year to amass them), Father used some credit and opened a business. . . . Though father engaged in trade from  to , his ill-managed business never fully supported our large family of eight. I and my brothers were forced to take parttime jobs from the age of eighteen onward. After the German War, father liquidated his business to pay his debts and returned to clerical service.

Rastrenin constructed the following syllogisms: World War I was fought by the bourgeoisie on the back of the working class; my father suffered from the 

Classes Made and Unmade

war; therefore, he must have been on the proletarian side. The same argument is restated employing the theme of redemption: “My father’s brief engagement in trade—very short in comparison with his thirty-eight years of work as an employee—is the only black spot on his past. You can judge how insignificant this activity was by the documents showing that father never had the means to ascend to a ‘merchant position’ [kupecheskoe zvanie]. Father remained what he was prior to opening his business, a ‘peasant.’ ” The supplicant’s inversion of the old regime’s status scale is a noteworthy pirouette that attested to considerable mastery of the Bolshevik language of class: his father was virtuous because of his failure to achieve the status of a merchant, hardly a despicable status at the time he had failed. Since he had remained registered in the peasant estate Rastrenin’s father was supposedly close to the prerevolutionary proletariat. Certificates issued by the local Party committee of the Krasnoiarsk Commune were adduced to corroborate this argument: “Nikolai’s father comes from a peasant family of Riazan’ province. He has been a member of the trade union since . Nikolai Rastrenin himself is adequately qualified to study at the requirements of the proletarian university.” Yet another Party organ reassured the institute that Rastrenin was the son of an accountant who did not belong to a political party and who was loyal to Soviet power. Relying on these testimonials, Rastrenin summarized: “Based as it was primarily on class grudges against my father, my expulsion from the institute should be revoked. In our small city everyone knows everyone, and this is especially true of my father, who is an ‘old resident’ [starozhil]. Had his past been compromised, Father would never have been allowed to become a Soviet employee, let alone a member of the union.”²⁶ The appeal composed by Vodopianov, the son of a former gendarme, is interesting in that it wittingly mixes all defense strategies available to the “class alien”: I have not lived with my father for three years. This means that during all this time I have not received material or ideological support from him. And yet, it was because of him that I was turned down by the institute . . . It is unjust to discriminate against me only because, not yet independent at the time, I lived at the expense of a railroad station gendarme. During the February Revolution I was merely nine years old. It is unjust to prefer youngsters who have only recently left the school bench. They have no callouses on their hands since they still sit on their father’s lap. Constant reference to one’s parents calls to mind the proverb “But our ancestors saved Rome!”



   

The last phrase is an allusion to a fable by Krylov. The fable describes geese, who are extremely proud that when the Samnites attacked Rome under the cover of night their ancestors’ clamor woke up the city’s defenders. The peasant in the story asks the geese repeatedly if they have any personal merits, but they only reiterate that they have a noble parentage. The peasant naturally concludes that they are good only for a meal and leads them off to be slaughtered. In invoking this fable, Vodopianov implied that no one should be judged based on the activities of his parents. “Only in the most benighted of villages is a child beaten when his father is caught stealing horses.” Besides, he added, “my father was not a provincial gendarme but a station gendarme, hence in no position to be involved in serious police business. His negligible political importance is proven by the fact that he has never been put on any [GPU] list.”²⁷ Vodopianov’s bunching together of three interrelated but somewhat contradictory claims calls to mind Freud’s famous kettle dream. In this dream, having borrowed a kettle from a neighbor, and having been charged with breaking it, Freud asserted that, first, he had given it back undamaged; second, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and third, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbor at all. Freud commented that “if only a single one of these three lines of defense were to be accepted as valid, I would have to be acquitted.”²⁸ The same could be said of Vodopianov who claimed that () he had severed his ties with his family, () one should not be judged by his parents, and () his father’s guilt was not so grave. Because students from the peasantry did not risk social ostracism, their appeals were bolder and more aggressive. The supplicants knew that, as peasants who lived in a system that drew its legitimacy from a peasant-worker alliance, they were in a position to demand class privilege and would not have to deal with class discrimination. Iurok, who was expelled in July  from the October Revolution Leningrad workers’ faculty as “insufficiently experienced in labor,” premised his appeal on the claim that the toiling peasantry stood very close to the working class on the Bolshevik class ladder. “From as early as I can remember, I have been exploited by rich peasants. Only after the Bolshevik land repartition did we get . desiatinas of land. The documents given to me by the military executive committee testify that before the Revolution my father was an agricultural laborer who worked the landlord’s domain.” Having established the grounds on which he could claim an identity of a “toiling peasant,” Iurok asserted that he found it “ludicrous that 

Classes Made and Unmade

one can work in the village until the age of twenty-five and yet be considered to have no labor experience.”²⁹ Working a variation on this defense strategy, Klianksen, who was purged from the Estonian workers’ faculty for “evasion of public work,” stressed the political potential of his village background: “I am a proletarian peasant from one of the poorest households in the village. That is, I am an agricultural laborer. My brother is a Party organizer. Does that not mean that I came from the type of family on which Soviet rule relies?” Owing whatever land he had to the Revolution and immersed, as all poor peasants were supposed to have been, in Bolshevik revolutionary activity, Klianksen argued he was integrated into the proletarian collective.³⁰ The multifarious character of “peasant” identity could make its contestation fascinating. The experience of Akulin, purged from the workers’ faculty at Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers in  as “a class alien . . . with inadequate labor experience,” is a case in point. To demonstrate his proletarian identity, the supplicant procured a certificate from his local soviet, which stated that “the Akulins, a family of poor peasants, have a small plot that can sustain only two souls. Most of the plot is infertile.” But this narrative did not go unchallenged. A very different version of Akulin’s social physiognomy was brought to the attention of the Party district committee and Narkompros by the institute’s purge commission: While Akulin is a peasant by social origin it is doubtful whether he ever worked the soil. Even the rudiments of agriculture are foreign to him. The plot of land in Akulin’s possession, located in Penza province, is cultivated through the labor of others. This student severed his ties with agriculture. Hardly a young man, Akulin is politically and socially underdeveloped and passive. His work experience as a clerk certainly does not justify retaining him in the workers’ faculty.

While Akulin made a documented claim to deserving a place in a proletarian institute because of his peasant class origins, the case against him was strengthened when his detractors called attention to his current “social position.” The evidence the supplicant advanced regarding his peasant class affiliation was dismissed as a crude sociologism. It may be true, conceded his opponents in an argument that would exploit important nuances in the discourse of class, that Akulin’s family had only . desiatinas of arable land. It may even be true that the Akulins were counted as a “poor household” in the cen

   

sus. All this was immaterial: in making others till his land, Akulin became a kulak exploiter who had no business in a proletarian institution. The next round in this status bloodbath took place when Akulin appealed to the Narkompros plenipotentiary. By now his class position had been adjudicated, and the bone of contention was “Akulin’s abstention from public work.” This time it was the supplicant who employed the discourse of class in an ingenious fashion: My detractors claim that I avoid my social responsibilities at the institute. But I am an ordinary laborer with no special skills that would make me an indefatigable propagandist. Working toward the liquidation of illiteracy, studying the living conditions and daily routines of teenagers, I did my best not to be passive. . . . I sacrificed to the proletarian cause all the time I had left over after agricultural chores.

Contending both that he was a brute proletarian unaccustomed to intellectual pursuits and that he was a zealous Communist proselytizer, the supplicant wanted to have it both ways. Aware of the impression he gave of incoherence, Akulin hinted that his incompatible claims were forced upon him by the inherently contradictory expectations he had to meet.³¹ Although it was not easy to separate the social and the political attributes of the peasantry or the intelligentsia, it was still meaningful within the Bolshevik discourse to argue that some members of these classes supported the Revolution while others were its opponents. The Bolshevik verdict regarding the nonproletarian classes was sufficiently amorphous as to provide some room for discursive maneuvering: taking advantage of the fact that members of the peasantry or the intelligentsia could be somewhat imperfect, student supplicants who belonged to these classes played off their social origins against their political biographies to the best possible effect. By contrast, the social and the political were supposed to be totally fused in workers’ identities. As far as the official discourse was concerned, to say that a student was a “worker” and yet an opponent of Bolshevism was simple nonsense. Workers who had been disloyal to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat simply ceased being “workers” and became “petit bourgeois.” The exalted position of the worker in the Soviet Union meant that students with worker backgrounds were expected to achieve high standards. The rhetoric surrounding worker-student appeals suggests that, while promising much, workers’ identity put high demands on its bearers. Denounced as



Classes Made and Unmade

“politically suspect,” Alfredov, a workers’ faculty student at Leningrad State University, argued that the statements attributed to him were inconceivable because he would never even dream of rising against his own government. A chain of logical deductions ostensibly demonstrated the hollowness of the accusations leveled against him: “The suggestion that I have done anything of the sort is a great insult to me. . . . As a worker, I believe that the only legitimate power is Soviet Power. Had I been agitating against it, my place would have been not in the workers’ faculty but in jail. I certainly do not study in order to spread a senseless and offensive anti-Soviet propaganda.”³² Only one firmly opposed to Soviet Power would deny the theoretical premises on which Bolshevik rule was based. Clearly it must be the denouncer—not Alfredov himself—who was a foe of Soviet Power. The adjudication of the case of a student from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, Balashov, operated on the same premises, though this time these principles came to haunt the supplicant. Balashov was stripped of his status as a worker during the  purge because it was found that he did not think like a true worker. The protocol of the purge commission stated that in “questioning Balashov regarding his work in the Red Army we learned that although he considers himself a working-class volunteer, Balashov condemns the work of the political branches of the Red Army.” The work referred to was that of the Cheka and the Bolshevik revolutionary courts. Since, so the Bolshevik logic went, any worker would understand the expediency of Red Terror, and since Balashov failed to grasp this truth, he could not be a true worker. The mandate commission allowed Balashov to graduate from the workers’ faculty but deprived him of the right to automatic university admission. In effect, Balashov was scratched from the working-class rolls.³³ The Bolsheviks suspected that many workers lost their eschatological mettle in the universities and sank into degeneracy. Karpilevich, a student in the Leningrad Mining Institute’s workers’ faculty, was purged and sent back to production “to regain his proletarian spirit.” His appeal was a last ditch attempt to convince the purge commission that his working-class spirit had not abandoned him: Recall that I come from a proletarian milieu. My mother is a worker and my father is a miner. In addition, my ideological convictions are strictly proletarian. Your qualms regarding my class spirit are unfounded. There is no doubt in my mind that a stay in the university would not alter my ideology.



    The working class is precious to me. Its mission is sacred. Presently, I maintain ties with individual workers and worker organizations exclusively. If the need to drop the book and pick up the rifle arises I will attack the bourgeoisie with great strength and energy.

By skillfully reversing the NEP slogan “Substitute a Book for a Rifle” and by evoking what was widely believed to be the apotheosis of proletarian purity during the Civil War, Karpilevich not only linked himself to a chain of significations related to the working class but also associated his recent turn to education with the Party’s call to workers to seek knowledge.³⁴ Almost all the students who were purged on the initiative of the Party cell were described as “socially alien.” When someone was removed from the university as “politically alien,” this usually meant that his name appeared on this or that GPU’s blacklist, in which case university authorities might well be unaware of the incriminating details. When Elishevich was purged from Tomsk Technological Institute as “politically alien” he made a typical complaint: “What is most difficult is that I have no idea why GPU closed the university doors to me. I feel helpless.” When another student at the same school, Klyshenko, inquired why he was considered “politically alien,” the dean only “shrugged his shoulders.”³⁵ The hand of the GPU was evident in the following damaging characterizations of Tomsk students: “came from a family of out-and-out counterrevolutionaries”; “was disdainful toward Ilich”; “was a volunteer in Kolchak’s penitentiary detachment”; “was an active participant in an uprising against Soviet Power in Minusinsk at the age of eighteen”; and “concealed his service as a cadet in the old army and volunteer service in the White Army.” All the preceding comments were included in the accusations of students purged in . Whenever possible, GPU produced evidence to show that Civil War enemies had not repented but only employed more surreptitious techniques, such as “conducting anti-Soviet propaganda,” “actively desecrating Soviet symbols,” and “preferring drinking bouts to proletarian student festivities.” Alignment with non-Bolshevik students also placed a student on the GPU blacklist: “through the speeches he makes at the general student meetings countering the suggestions of the Communist faction he attempts to sabotage the work to reform higher education”; “associates with the SR oriented students”; “a popular leader of alien students whose true nature was revealed in  during the arrival of Nansen’s mission when links with the Menshe

Classes Made and Unmade

viks and the SRs became manifest”; “orients himself toward the reactionary part of the professoriate”; “stood up against the university Communists.”³⁶ The GPU was involved also in the purge of Petrograd students, though apparently less so than in Siberia. One student was expelled from the workers’ faculty at Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers in , for example, because the GPU maintained that he “had friends who were foreign currency marketeers,” and that he had gloated when Volodarskii was assassinated, “expressing sorrow that other Soviet potentates had not been shot.”³⁷ “Politically dangerous students” faced virtually impossible odds in appealing GPU verdicts. In constructing apologies for their political pasts they had to plumb the depths of their poetic ingenuity, usually to no avail. Such appeals seldom dwelt on class physiognomy—not that class was entirely unimportant, but the Bolshevik theorists had developed sophisticated methods of social classification mainly as a precaution in case of a future class war. If political disloyalty had already manifested itself in the past, the Bolshevik class calculus was rendered largely superfluous—whoever had sided with the enemy was classified in the camp of the exploiters, regardless of class origins. A denunciation received at Siberian University in June  bore the mark of such assumptions: “On my return from the Red Army I learned that Grigorii Vainshtein is now a student. You should know that in  Vainshtein took part in a White uprising in the city of Tara which dismantled Soviet Power there, personally participating in arrests of Communists. . . . Such elements have a place not in a proletarian student family but in quite a different institution.”³⁸ Students who were “unmasked” as former Kolchak officers faced perhaps the worst odds of all. The masterminds behind the counterrevolutionary war effort, they could hardly claim a mechanical, unpremeditated enrollment on the wrong side. The only recourse open to them was to argue that while ostensibly participating in the White cause they had actually worked to subvert it. Having been purged from Tomsk Technological Institute in , Chernykh wrote: Already during the German War I was an officer. From the first days I was disappointed by the actions of the army’s commanding crew, as I witnessed a cruel, inhuman attitude toward the soldiers. Sociopolitical backwardness was everywhere. Ideologically, I was closer to the rank-and-file soldier than to the officer corps. Soldiers knew that I was their ceaseless defender vis-à-vis the commanders. 

   

Chernykh went on to claim that his election to a battalion committee during the days of the February Revolution is proof that he was not a counterrevolutionary. The Provisional Siberian Government, he further contended, had forced him to take on the duties of an officer but he had never subscribed to the worldview of the White movement. Mobilized as an officer, I dodged service as best I could. I was shocked by the terrible massacre of Communists and peaceful civilians orchestrated by the government. Later I saved the lives of two Social Democrats who were to be handed over to the White authorities for interrupting Kolchak’s public greeting at the Barnaul city hall. Thus I find in my past nothing glaringly counterrevolutionary.

When purged from Omsk Medical Institute on GPU instructions as a “former White,” Samoilenko employed a similar strategy in his appeal. He downplayed his commitment to the White effort by arguing that he had never been a Kolchak volunteer. “In  I was mobilized by the Provisional Siberian Government. My tasks were limited to non-active duty as a scribe and clerk. Altogether I only served in the White Army for sixteen months, exactly the same amount of time I spent in the ranks of the Red Army.” Both Samoilenko and Chernykh insisted that they had joined not the archreactionary army of Kolchak but the military force of the Provisional Siberian Government that had preceded Kolchak’s rise to power in Siberia; both argued that they had been drafted into the White Army despite their political convictions; and finally, both mentioned in passing they had not been active combatants against Bolshevik forces. Samoilenko alleged that he had ended up actually serving in the Red Army ranks and Chernykh presented himself as a veritable Red interloper in the White camp.³⁹ Those students who had volunteered for the White Army during the Civil War were immediately identified as “deliberate” (umyshlennyi) counterrevolutionaries rather than “weak souls” (slabovol’nyi). Only if they were able to prove that they had been drafted into the White Army against their wills did Kolchak soldiers stand a chance of being forgiven. Purged from Omsk Veterinary Institute in , Isaev argued that “born in , I was drafted directly from the school bench. In Kansk I changed sides and joined the Red Army.”⁴⁰ In a similar case, when Lebedev, a student purged from Tomsk State University, begged Narkompros to reconsider his case, he was challenged to prove that he “had not volunteered.” Unable to do so, Lebedev was crestfallen: 

Classes Made and Unmade

“Most Siberians know that in February of  Kolchak drafted the ‘census element’ born in . In my Orenburg unit even individuals a full year younger than myself were forcefully enlisted. But in order to provide a sure proof one would have to find an appropriate White Army military document, and most of those were destroyed during Kolchak’s retreat.”⁴¹ The best a former White officer could do was to claim a sort of split identity during the Civil War. Aware that, whereas class affiliation could be objectively determined, counterrevolutionism was a state of mind, purged students claimed that even while their bodies were in the White barracks their spirits had remained loyal to the Revolution. A former White Army officer, Miliukov, was purged from Tomsk Technological Institute. His appeal is a remarkable example of how one might carefully craft a narrative in order to transform an anti-Soviet identity into a Bolshevik identity. Miliukov dwelt extensively on his experiences during the Civil War: Upon demobilization from the disintegrating tsarist army in , I went to Irkutsk. No less than three uprisings against Soviet Power took place in the city during that year, but the Reds did not suspect me of participating in so much as one of them. Due to my line of work I had close ties to the workers, who knew me very well. The chairman of the local soviet, Smirnov, took me . . . into protective custody and had me settled in a working-class neighborhood, so that I “would be protected from excesses.” Working in the Irkutsk hospital I consoled the wounded and was in no way persecuted.

After the Czech uprising placed Siberia in the hands of the Whites, our protagonist was mobilized by Kolchak as an officer. Miliukov attempted to downplay what he knew to be by far the most incriminating aspect of his biography: “Later on, still in Irkutsk, I ran into Smirnov again. He was now being harassed by the Kolchakovists. When I saw his rifle and bullets I advised him to hide them more carefully so that we would not be suspected of anything. ‘I do not care if you see these things,’ Smirnov responded. ‘I would never think that you could be a traitor.’” Stressing his connections with the Bolshevik underground and dropping a “we” that clearly meant “we Bolsheviks,” the supplicant offered a sweeping gloss on his Civil War record. “When Kolchak was in power I did all I could to avoid service. When I became ill I was evacuated from the front. On December , , I gave myself up to the Red Army in Kansk, in an individual act”—that is, his decision to surrender was a personal and therefore conscious choice, and his was not part



   

of the group surrenders considered mechanical. The appeal concluded with Miliukov’s description of how he had rejoined the front, this time on the Red side, how he had enrolled in the Red Commission for the Struggle Against Deserters, and how he had been sent to work at the Cheliabinsk Cheka, of all places. According to Miliukov, he was at a loss to explain why his education had been terminated.⁴² In these appeals, student identity was almost always framed within the strict parameters of the official discourse. The discourse of class was the only discourse permissible in the Bolshevik public sphere. This does not mean that students were incapable of conceptualizing what was happening to them outside of the class framework. The circulation of derisive ditties such as the mock student ideal “Give me for a ruble and a half / A father from the bench / A mother from the plough” points in the opposite direction.⁴³ Still, it is remarkable that the extensive appeal material gathered by the Siberian and Leningrad Party apparatuses and Narkompros contained only two supplications questioning the very premises of the official discourse. One such letter was signed by Chistoserdova, who had been purged from the Tomsk State University. In a very unusual move, Chistoserdova challenged the very meaning of the term “socially alien”: While I realize that I am obliged to refute this description of myself I simply cannot understand its real meaning. I would ask the purge commission to explain it to me. Do you contend that social origins have the effect of either bringing someone close to the proletariat or distancing him from it? But if this is your contention, I can bring many examples to the contrary. On many occasions social origins have not hindered one from becoming a student, or even a power holder.

Chistoserdova may have had either the social upstarts of distant Russian history in mind, or conversely, the nobly born Bolsheviks who had recently grabbed the wheel of government. She concluded this part of her appeal with a sweeping condemnation of the Bolshevik emphasis on social origins: “Should we be blamed for what our parents are? No! Everyone is responsible for his own deeds, his own mistakes.” The task of establishing the class affiliation of a female, Chistoserdova went on to say, was extremely difficult: Our situation is particularly precarious. The female still does not have rights of her own. At first, she carries her father’s surname, receiving from him



Classes Made and Unmade moral and financial support. When she marries, she changes her second name and now gets everything from her husband. Does that leave her social position unaltered? . . . I had been married to a doctor who recently became ill and died. When her husband dies, a widow becomes fully autonomous [samostoiatel’naia], independent [nezavisimaia], and separated from her relatives. Now no one deems it his duty to help her . . . From the point of view of her father she has, as the saying goes, left the nest.⁴⁴

Although at times rather strident, Chistoserdova’s tone was generally conciliatory. At one point, in a curious combination of Populist and Bolshevik speech habits, she suggested she had a spiritual link with the toilers: “I do not think that labor is foreign to me; I entered the university and chose to be a doctor with the sole aim of helping the people.” Subtly, by means of an unassuming, humble request to be told “what this issue of class origins is all about,” she attempted to show the vagueness and ultimate unfairness of class criteria. One of the very few female students whose appeals survived, Chistoserdova reasserted the values of individualism and brought into sharp relief the inadequacy of class discourse in helping women articulate a claim for dignity and independence. Another appeal shunning Bolshevik narratological prescriptions came from Vil’tsyn, a Leningrad Mining Institute student. As a “class alien,” Vil’tsyn had been stripped of his rights to a graduation certificate by the mandate commission. His indictment was based on standard denunciations asserting that he was “the son of a kulak . . . academically inactive and uninterested in public work,” who had managed to enter the workers’ faculty by bypassing the admissions commission.⁴⁵ Vil’tsyn’s appeal openly transgressed the boundaries of the discourse of class. Rather than arguing that the specific motives behind the decision of the commission were mistaken, the supplicant questioned the legitimacy of its very existence: I believe the decision of the Mandate Commission to issue me, a graduate of the workers’ faculty, a certificate denying me the “rights to apply to the universities” is illegal. Such a decision can be made solely by a court since its meaning is equivalent to loss of citizen’s rights in a republic. When one bears in mind that the same individuals made up the four commissions that evaluated my case, one realizes that there never was any hope that my rights would be reinstated. The decision of each lower commission was mechanically approved by the higher one.



   

Vil’tsyn ridiculed the entire appeal procedure. Questioning the very grounds for the existence of such proletarian institutions as the Mandate Commission, he raised his spear against Soviet Power itself. To do so in a letter to a Central Mandate Commission was hardly a constructive course of action. As Vil’tsyn no doubt realized, his desperate move was doomed.⁴⁶ If students hoped to be reinstated in the university, they had to abide by the official rules. GPU files mention occasional student grumbling about the  purge: Rumors circulate about student suicides in Leningrad. Some claim that a day does not pass without eight to ten students killing themselves. . . . Many stated that students should appeal before VTsIK, opposing administrative disenfranchisement and questioning the legality of the purge procedure. A Veterinary Institute student, a certain Rishes, admitted that he had considered appearing before the Siberian commission but thought that “it makes more sense to immigrate abroad.” There are those who believe that “there is nothing to be done but wait. In the forthcoming Party Congress the Communists will have to make concessions. Otherwise, the Entente will present them with harsh demands which they will have to satisfy pending military intervention.” Still others say: “Something has to be done in order to curtail the power of the special organs. The actions of GPU are particularly arbitrary.”

Such reports, however, do not necessarily reflect the contours of a powerful student counter-discourse. Two assumptions have to be questioned here: that “every criticism of official policies constitutes” resistance to Bolshevism and that when free of the constraints of the Soviet public sphere, “resisters” spoke in a liberal dialect. Scathing as they were, however, the reproaches which the GPU intercepted seldom took issue with the official discourse as such. For example, it is interesting to note that while students challenged the authority of the Party and the GPU, they accepted the legitimacy of other Soviet organs, VTsIK being a case in point. No doubt, coercion mattered: one Siberian student who justified his cowardly praise of the purge campaign admitted that “with the threat of expulsion over your head you will support anything they tell you to support!” The key issue, however, is not whether he spoke differently in private (subversion, and not just appropriation of the official language, was an everyday affair) but what he said when it really mattered. At least one Siberian GPU informant assured authorities that “the petit-bourgeois students . . . who engage in openly anti-Party politics con

Classes Made and Unmade

fine their activity to their appanage” (udel)—the Russian feudal lord’s private domain, an icon of parochialism.⁴⁷ Once the Bolshevik discourse infiltrated the very core of social life, everybody was coopted in one way or another.

Class Identities Renegotiated Throughout the spring and summer of  a running battle went on between Narkompros, which tended to defend students, and the Party, which pressed for a thorough purge. According to Narkompros’s summary, eighteen thousand students (about  percent of the student body) were purged in the RSFSR in . Other sources bring this number to thirty-three thousand.⁴⁸ Launching an initiative to halt the purge, Narkompros instructed purge commissions to decelerate the checkup, in June, but the attempt failed and the purge continued well into the fall.⁴⁹ The student appeal process was a natural field of battle between those who wanted to continue the purge and those who wished to curtail it. Although Narkompros plenipotentiaries advised the Party district committees to create a forum for the “speedy review of the appeals” and to limit the purge to the “truly” alien elements alone, provincial Party organs insisted on keeping the purge rate high. In Tomsk, appeals were accepted during the five days after the publication of the results of the checkup. Tomsk Technological Institute tried to treat this stage of the purge procedure in a perfunctory manner. “Those students who were purged deserve their fate,” the local purge commission stated. “The most careful scrutiny of the additional documents they had amassed in their defense enabled us to reinstate no more than  individuals” (out of , . percent). Sending the remaining student appeals to the Central Siberian Purge Commission, the local commission believed it unlikely that the remote authorities in Novonikolaevsk could make a better judgment. The local commission appended the following recommendation to the material on the supplicants: “Ignore all the appeals we have declined in Tomsk. Here, in the institute, we follow a student beginning with his first day of studies because we have to assess his tuition, stipends eligibility and capacity to work in the professional sections, so we know who deserves what.”⁵⁰ The Tomsk Technological Institute Communists reminded Novonikolaevsk that a top Narkompros official, Vengerov, who was staying in Tomsk to supervise the purge, promised that “only in extreme cases will appeals be ac

   

cepted.” In a preemptive move, they pleaded with the Novonikolaevsk Appeal Commission to disregard the certificates obtained by the student supplicants: In the process of our work we have realized how dubious are many of the recommendations coming from Party members, from professional organizations and from professors. Comrade Mikhailenko, for instance, supported Kudoiarov, who is a student in a chemical faculty and the son of a merchant with strong anti-Soviet sentiments. Or take the typical case of the building faculty student Spetsiia, who outwitted the barely literate chairman of a house committee and was awarded a certificate attesting that “he is materially insecure.” This despite the fact that Spetsiia’s father owns two houses and his kin all earn handsome salaries. Professors resent the purge and give recommendations to “suffering students,” setting all questions of integrity aside. Kalishev, a known sympathizer with the Black Hundreds, supported the science student Egorov, though the latter was a volunteer in Kaledin’s forces. . . . Recommendations are sent directly to Novonikolaevsk and we cannot double-check them. Do not reinstate anyone before informing us so that, if necessary, we will be able to send you supplementary materials.⁵¹

Still, the Siberian capital approved many appeals. Writing from a boat taking him from Novonikolaevsk to Tomsk, a local official who had been dismayed by the benevolence of Novonikolaevsk authorities urgently notified Narkompros on July , , that “the vessel is full of reinstated students who write to friends in Tomsk saying that everyone who comes to Novonikolaevsk is being reinstated. They contend that the Central Commission is ‘humane and just’ whereas the local commission is ‘terrible.’ This kind of comparison between local and central commissions has to be stopped.”⁵² The large volume of reinstatements suggests that a successful reinterpretation of identity was not unlikely. The minutes of the reinstatement commission demonstrate how students’ identities could be whitewashed. Thus the “socially alien” Aleksandrov, “the materially secure son of a policeman” in Tomsk, became in Novonikolaevsk the son of “someone who was a policeman fifteen long years ago, and spent the last three years in a mental hospital. Supporting a mother and a sister and working as a porter Aleksandrov should not have been classified as socially alien.” Deich, characterized in Tomsk as the “socially alien and politically questionable daughter of a merchant,” was transformed into an invalid’s daughter. “Her family lives on the money earned by her brother who is a painter. Another brother is a volun-



Classes Made and Unmade

teer in the Red Army who has recommendations from trustworthy Communists.” The “politically illiterate” Popova who hangs out with “counterrevolutionary students” was found to be a “teacher who had organized a Komsomol cell and opened an adult reading room in her village.” According to Tomsk, the father of one Afanaseva was a “class alien priest” but in Novonikolaevsk he was found to be “a simple psalms-reader who died when his daughter was seven.” He could not have been involved in the formative experiences that shaped Afanaseva’s social identity. Likewise, “the socially alien and politically suspect son of a priest, the student Kiselev,” had buried his father no less than eight years earlier. Moreover, “Kiselev had worked in a Soviet institution already during the first Soviet regime in Tomsk!” It appears that the higher-placed commission chose to deemphasize social origins in favor of vocation, accepting a recurrent argument that students should be judged by their own actions and not by those of their parents.⁵³ The success of so many appeals infuriated the Party cell at Tomsk Technological Institute, which intervened to reverse the process. A communiqué from the cell bureau complained that reinstated students were allowed to claim that the “Tomsk commission had allegedly committed many mistakes, having misunderstood the center’s directives. As a result, an attitude developed that is best captured by the phrase ‘Let me go to Novonikolaevsk, tell them a story and, who knows, maybe I’ll get myself reinstated. Here it is hopeless anyway.’ Did not a White Army cadet like Lederman, to give just one example, manage to get himself reinstated by taking advantage of Novonikolaevsk credulity in class matters?” Proletarian students could not afford the extravagance of a trip to the Siberian capital. “They had to remain in Tomsk and work. Only the most well-off students can afford such a luxury.”⁵⁴ Vol’fovich, chairman of the purge commission, wrote an urgent letter to Kassior and the Tomsk Party provincial committee and complained that, whereas the Siberian Regional Purge Commission praised his work, Novonikolaevsk reinstated students left and right: Moreover the Siberian Reinstatement Commission published the list of those reinstated right away, thereby contradicting the directives of the Party regarding procedure and electrifying the atmosphere. During his stay here Vengerov promised that not a single student would be reinstated by the central authorities and that if extraordinary circumstances arose we would be



    consulted. Well, in no less than  percent of the cases the circumstances have been found “extraordinary” and we have been consulted in none of them. I have to warn the Party that readmission of the purged students will force us to turn down many of the workers’ faculty graduates who flow to us from across the country.⁵⁵

Vol’fovich made a remarkable bid of his own to reinterpret the Novonikolaevsk reclassification of student class identities: Varapaev, the self-proclaimed “employee and member of a water-transport trade union,” was purged by us on the basis of clause  as a counterrevolutionary. We certainly knew what we were doing. Arrested by the Cheka in  as an arms speculator, this student presently frequents SR elements and exerts a negative influence on the student body. Similarly, we have rightly described Butkevich as an “idle element.” Butkevich concealed his social position in the questionnaire but we discovered that his father was a goldsmith. We invoked clause  to purge the self-styled employee, Korobov, because he is “nonproletarian in his ideology.” Korobov thereupon cried out, “Alas, let the good-for-nothing worker engineers fill the universities! Maybe then, once I have a foreign diploma, I will be properly evaluated.”⁵⁶

Vol’fovich convinced the Tomsk Party provincial committee bureau to second his criticism of the Central Siberian Purge Commission. Shortly thereafter, a significant number of students designated as reinstated in the protocols of the Central Appeal Commission were castigated once again. The wheel of class categories spun once more. Table 6 Applications to the Siberian Appeal Commission, 1924 Appeals

Initially Reinstated

Finally Reinstated

Tomsk State University

245

94

72

Tomsk Technological Institute

230

99

56

Source: GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –.

As the above table indicates, the short span between April and November of  classes were defined and redefined, made and unmade, battled over and renegotiated. Sometimes this happened several times over.



Classes Made and Unmade

The Vicissitudes of Proletarianization In the wake of what was probably the most comprehensive academic purge in Soviet history and utilizing whatever political momentum the purge had created, according to official sources the  admissions campaign was “most successful” in terms of the proletarianization policy. All academic candidates in that year had to go through the dispatch system. Unsponsored applications were completely eliminated.⁵⁷ Narkompros’s decision to slice admissions quotas by almost one-half also contributed to proletarianization. Because the pool of “proletarian candidates” was believed to be limited, low admissions supposedly “saved the universities from class contamination.” At this stage, the industrial lobby did not object to such reductions in admissions, arguing that the country suffered from “overproduction of experts” as it was.⁵⁸ Admissions to Tomsk higher educational institutions in the fall of  reflected the peak of proletarianization, at least as far as the s went. The Party controlled the admissions process totally. The admissions commission at Tomsk Technological Institute, for example, consisted of representatives from the board of administration, the trade unions, the Party provincial committee, Narkompros, and the cell’s acting secretary—all proletarians by social position and all Communists; two of them had even joined the Party before the Revolution.⁵⁹ The effect of the commission’s class purism can be gleaned from its admissions summary (see table ). Information in the table portrayed the student body at Tomsk Technological Institute as nearly ideal. All the newcomers were described in class terms, estate categories were not mentioned, and “idle elements” were absent. Everything testified to the effectiveness of the quota system: no one was allowed to take university entrance exams—let alone gain admission—without a dispatch. Individual applications simply were not considered. Only  applicants took entrance exams—a negligible number considering that  applications were submitted (workers’ faculty graduates were exempt from examinations; they enrolled automatically). Even such “proletarian institutions” as trade unions and provincial executive committees failed to secure vacancies.⁶⁰ The highly proletarian composition of the student body in , in Siberia and elsewhere in the country, became a source of pride to the Party. Later in the decade, the Party would find it nearly impossible to repeat this success.



    Table 7 Admissions to Tomsk Technological Institute, 1924 Class Factor in Admissions Admission Route

Applied Accepted

Applied Accepted

Workers’ faculty

322

310

With dispatches

24

16

Children of workers

Workers from the bench 201 26

23

Without dispatches

—

—

Land tillers

36

35

Admitted to exams

19

—

Children of land tillers

38

34

Disqualified

—

—

Employees

33

31

Exempted from exams

—

315

Children of employees

12

7

Withdrew their applications

Intellectual laborers

—

—

12

— Children of intellectual laborers

—

—

Artisans

—

—

Children of artisans

—

—

Idle elements

—

—

Children of idle elements —

—

Party members

Total applications:

346

196

136

126

Komsomol members

87

84

Other parties

—

—

326

Source: GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. .

The following years witnessed the rise and decline of a number of class categories that complicated the assessment of university proletarianization. The status of the peasantry was reexamined first. In the mid-s, when the pro-peasant Nikolai Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov duo sought to solidify the worker-peasant alliance, Narkompros “turned its face to the countryside.”⁶¹ Rykov suggested that the new favoritism shown to peasants in academic enrollment was a governmental response to legitimate complaints about a Soviet constitution favoring urbanites. He cited a protest lodged by a peasant who, having taken the floor at the Conference of the Southeastern Region that Rykov attended, mentioned the high proportion of peasants in the total population and went on to ask whether an equal percentage of the total number of spots in university admissions was reserved for peasants. Many such protests were lodged. Leningrad university authorities intercepted the following anonymous note: “The state has real sons and stepsons—those who 

Classes Made and Unmade

make bread end up starving or roam the city begging, whereas those who stand at the bench glut themselves, hoard and hide bread away.”⁶² In  Narkompros decided to improve the position of the peasants in academic admissions. The quotas for the “toiling peasantry” (and the demobilized Red Army soldiers who were predominantly peasants) were dramatically raised.⁶³ The Leningrad Party organization instructed districts “that peasants should be handled with particular care” and sent to the universities “in sufficient numbers.” The Party county committees were instructed to familiarize themselves with entrance requirements. Narkompros officials estimated that at least six thousand of the eighteen thousand vacant university places would be occupied by peasants.⁶⁴ What made such a shift in policy possible was the Bolshevik belief that the peasant mass was now ready for conversion. According to Tan-Bogoraz, “the religion of Communism” became very popular in the villages. “The Revolution had furrowed the whole mass of the people with a steel plough so deeply that the peasantry can scarcely return to the old forms of life,” Gorky maintained. “Like the Jews whom Moses led out of Egyptian slavery, the half-savage and stupid Russian villagers will die out . . . and a new tribe of literate, sensible, hearty people will take their place.” And Shvedov seconded this exuberance on behalf of Narkompros: Dwellers in the suburbs say that the lines of peasant Lomonosovs they saw this August call to mind the lines of peasant pilgrims standing before the Moscow and Kiev monasteries in olden times. Hundreds of peasant girls who have been promised in marriage and sold to their grooms have run away to the workers’ faculties. Peasant youth declared insane in the countryside have found their way to the workers’ faculty and were discovered to be talented poets, painters, musicians and inventors. . . . All of this is an indication of the cultural development of the poor peasantry and its striving toward the highest achievements of science. Previously those who came to study were either peasants demobilized by the Red Army or peasants who advanced through employment in soviet, Party, Komsomol, and cooperative organizations—the poor peasants knew nothing about how to get to the workers’ faculty. But now we are witnessing a completely new picture. The walls of workers’ faculties are literally falling apart as they try to accommodate the additional pilgrims from the rural backwoods, who have just cast aside their ploughs. Hundreds of peasants have traveled enormous distances by foot without a penny in their pockets and carrying only small bags of crusts on their backs.⁶⁵ 

   

The benevolent attitude toward the peasantry was strongly felt in the workers’ faculties where peasant enrollment grew from  percent in  to  percent in . Many governmental spokesmen noted the increased pressure of the countryside on the higher educational system. Narkompros permitted peasants to take entrance examinations even if they had no dispatch, provided they obtained a “request” (khodataistvo) from a Party committee or an executive committee on the county level. Organizations sending predominately peasant applicants were allowed to exceed their admissions quotas significantly. The Leningrad province executive committee, for example, instructed its local branches that the “peasantry is the target in this year’s admissions.” Peasant applicants had to be “employed in an agricultural enterprise, privately employed, or to work their own land ‘without recourse to hired labor.’ ”⁶⁶ Transformed from “petit bourgeois small proprietors” into “toilers,” the peasants of the s were as close to the “proletariat” as they would ever be. Table  gives a sense of the dramatic resurgence in peasant respectability. Besides showing a significant surge in peasant enrollment, table  shows the extent to which methods of class categorization were open to alterations. If only a year ago, admissions commissions had registered a borderline student as a “worker,” now Narkompros encouraged them to classify him as a “peasant.” For a short time, there was no talk about peasant “ossification” (zakostenelost’) and a surge in the workers’ faculty peasant component was regarded a blessing. As table  demonstrates, in some workers’ faculties the percentage of peasants among the enrolled exceeded their percentage among the applicants. It is likely that in a number of cases the admissions commis-

Table 8 Admissions of Peasants and Workers to Leningrad Workers’ Faculties, 1925 Peasants

Workers

Percentage of Percentage Percentage of Percentage All Who Applied Accepted All Who Applied Accepted Leningrad State University

45

43

53

50

Agricultural Institute

73

81

15

14

Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers

27

36

67

59

Source: TsGAOR(L), op. , d. , ll. –.



Classes Made and Unmade

sions altered the classification with which applicants came to the workers’ faculty, turning “workers” and “employees” into “peasants.” But this bucolic paradise was shortlived. As soon as the government ran into difficulties with grain procurement (), the favorable shift in the class assessment of peasantry came under heavy criticism and most of the peasants became enemies of the working class once again. Now the Narkompros heads were claiming they had never intended to bring about a large-scale “peasantization” of workers’ faculties. Suddenly, everybody recalled that the Bolshevik worker-peasant alliance was based on the ontologic superiority enjoyed by “workers” and not on full equality between the workers and peasants. Khodorovskii maintained that “all measures have to be taken to prevent ‘workers’ faculties’ from degenerating into ‘peasant faculties (krestfak).’ ” Kondrat’ev called for the instant expansion of the network of evening workers’ faculties, “because they were popular among the workers, who preferred not to lose the income of their industrial day jobs.” Henceforth,  percent of the vacancies in the workers’ faculties had to be reserved for the industrial proletariat.⁶⁷ The difficulties experienced by the government in obtaining political support in the village led Narkompros to consider only Bolshevized peasants worthy. The previously all-important socioeconomic criteria were downplayed during the  admissions campaign. What really mattered was the political profile of the peasant applicants. It was no longer enough to be a “peasant from the plough” to gain admission to a university. Instead, admissions commissions allocated a considerable number of vacancies to the discretion of the editorial boards of key peasant newspapers, now clearly privileging those peasants who had left agriculture for the pen and who had become “village correspondents” (krestkory). Behind the new policies lay the assumption that the consciousness of the village journalists deprived of land was superior to the consciousness of the property-owning peasants. Narkompros regulations from  stated that the cultural enlightenment sections and the village soviets had to give priority to “peasant activists,” that is, to members of the village soviet, propagandists in cooperatives, and peasant agitators on behalf of the Communist Loan Department. What had only two years before been considered as “peasant degeneration into white-collar elements” was now construed as a praiseworthy “peasant sovietization.”⁶⁸ Resurgent pessimism regarding the chances of a mass conversion of land-



   

owning peasants to universalism was compounded by a renewed sensitivity to the fact that, according to the correct Marxist class analysis, the peasantry “is not one class but many.” In the late s governmental branches recalled that only the lowest strata of the peasantry were “true allies of the workers’ government.” The rest were either kulaks or “kulak sympathizers” (kulakskie podpivaly). The notion of the good peasant was narrowed and duly reconceptualized; from “a peasant who does not use hired labor” it became “poor peasant.” The enthusiasm of Vikhirev for the sizable reduction in the proportion of peasant admissions in  manifested itself in a collection of the data set out in a table (see table ) he compiled to prove that the “depeasantization” of the workers’ faculties was taking place. By reading between the lines of Vikhirev’s commentary, we can surmise how the decrease in “peasant” numbers was manufactured. Vikhirev separated the total percentage of workers accepted into workers’ faculties in  into two columns, one for “workers” proper, the other for “agricultural laborers” who were defined in the Party statistics as “landless peasants who hire out their labor or workers on an agricultural farm.” Landless peasants who were classified as “peasants” in  became “peasant proletarians” in , now comfortably subsumed under the rubric “workers.” This new method of classification corresponded to the recent Central Statistical Agency stipulation that “agricultural hired laborers and the employees of state farms should be classified as ‘workers’ rather than as ‘peasants’ because they are remunerated on a wage basis.” No less significant is the fact that the data on the  peasantry were bifurcated, one column standing for “peasants,” the other for “poor peasants.” The village was now broken down into a plethora of classes and subclasses, some wealthy, some barely owning any land, some having no property at all. Clearly, authorities were guiding statisticians to seek and find as much rural class antagonism as possible.⁶⁹ Table 9 Admissions to RSFSR Workers’ Faculties, 1926–1927 1926

(in percentages)

1927

Workers

42

62.2 (50.5 + 11.7 [batraki] )

Peasants

53

33.1 (25.1 + 08.0 [bedniaki] )

Others

5

4.7

Source: N. Vikhirev, “Itogi priema na rabfaki v  godu,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. / (), p. .



Classes Made and Unmade

The Bolsheviks were preparing for the renewal of class struggle in the village and the new classification methods reflected the unraveling of the NEP class collaboration in the countryside. The “agricultural laborers,” a category that was not used throughout most of the s, suddenly became the largest class in the village. Leningrad Agricultural Institute, for example, reported in  that it had admitted forty-two “agricultural laborers” compared to only thirty-seven “peasants.” Statisticians explained the predominance of the “rural proletariat”—which they had just constructed from scratch—as a logical outcome of the progress of history. The Marxist dictum that the development of class struggle swells the ranks of the proletariat and diminishes the bourgeoisie was transposed onto the countryside; the rising numbers of agricultural laborers became an index of intensification of class struggle in the village.⁷⁰ The repoliticalization of class divisions in the village not only reinvented the rural proletariat but also intensified subdivisions among the land-owning peasantry. The statistician for the Omsk workers’ faculty was deploying the various peasant subcategories as early as . A year later, a significant number of Tomsk’s prospective students were unmasked as “kulaks.” Siberian authorities had felt the pressure to introduce a detailed class breakdown of the peasantry earlier than their Leningrad counterparts, because Siberia was known for its developed grain marketing, and the class struggle this marketing had brought about. A memorandum circulated by the Local Department of People’s Education in  quoted a dismayed teacher who criticized this renaissance of class divisiveness: “The country of the soviets is a proletarian country. From this it follows that all of the students in our country are proletarians. How much longer will we reiterate: ‘You are a landless peasant,’ ‘you are a poor peasant,’ ‘you are a middling peasant,’ ‘you are a kulak’?”⁷¹ But this was a voice in the wilderness. By , the divisive principles of class analysis had begun to be put into practice across the Soviet countryside. In parallel to the peasantry, the status of the intelligentsia was reappraised as well. The challenge of passing safely between the Scylla of giving up proletarianization and the Charybdis of forsaking minimal academic standards was the task of Narkompros official policy and directly affected the way the intelligentsia was appraised. Once again external pressures were the catalyst. During – the Bolsheviks came to the conclusion that the economy



   

had rebounded to its prewar capacity and that the time had come to move to the next stage of building Communism. As industrialization became the order of the day, Narkompros had to shift its focus from class purity to the production of large numbers of highly trained university graduates.⁷² While the proletarianization campaign of the mid-s was considered a great success, the campaign showed a negative side in a marked and increasingly worrisome deterioration in student performance: in , for example, only , students managed to graduate, out of a total , students enrolled in the universities of the Soviet Union. A commission formed by Narkompros to investigate specialist training called for urgent measures to improve students’ academic achievements. “After eight years of Soviet Power we have to abandon the belief that workers are incapable of studying,” Shvedov explained. “We inherited this belief from the old Russia of Oblomov. Yes, it is not easy for workers and peasants to get used to the study bench but it is certainly not impossible.” Another Narkompros official, Leonidov, concurred: “Our students should face rigid academic standards. ‘Better fewer, but better.’ ” The imbalance between the social agenda (proletarianization) and the economic agenda (training of specialists) of the Bolshevik university had to be redressed.⁷³ When, in June , academic credentials became a relevant enrollment criterion, the old intelligentsia now became acceptable raw material for the new intelligentsia. In  only an inch separated the intelligentsia from the disenfranchised, and white-collar students could be described as a “classalien . . . hereditary intelligentsia.” Only one year later, the meaning of the term “proletarian” was broadened to include what was now called with respect “toiling intelligentsia.” Quotas for Party and trade union applicants were curtailed; no more than  percent of those enrolled in  had taken advantage of them, as compared to about  percent in .⁷⁴ A Sovnarkom decree from July , , declared that the children of the “toiling intelligentsia” were to have the same privileges in admissions procedures as had the children of workers and peasants. An understanding was reached between Narkompros and professional trade unions that the following occupational categories would be subsumed under the “toiling intelligentsia” category: teachers, engineers, and technicians who were trade union members, as well as doctors who were members of the trade union medical section.⁷⁵ As a part of the process of reintroducing intelligentsia children to the universities, Narkompros established the so-called matriculation commissions 

Classes Made and Unmade

(attestatsionnye komissii)—a network of bodies within the regional People’s Education Departments that determined which high school graduates deserved a dispatch into higher education. Matriculation commissions determined pupils’ class affiliation on the basis of their official files and face-toface interviews. Those deemed suitable received a class clearance in the form of a reference letter and a “personal evaluation” (kharakteristika). For the first time, success in school became an important criterion for academic eligibility. These matriculation commissions were inevitably a painful concession for the Bolsheviks to make to the intelligentsia. The share of high school graduates among first-year students in RSFSR reportedly increased from  percent in  to  percent in .⁷⁶ This partial rehabilitation of the old intelligentsia prompted Narkompros to reevaluate the outcome of the  purge. Already in  reports started appearing in the press claiming that the Narkompros collegium was considering the possibility of wholesale reinstatements. Lunacharskii was quoted as saying that “what was done was not always just.” Moreover, the press added a scoop—Narkompros had already reviewed the list of students purged in  and agreed to reinstate about one or two thousand students nationwide.⁷⁷ By the beginning of the – academic year, reinstatement commissions were a reality. At Tomsk Technological Institute,  out of the  applicants who appealed their cases, most of them for the second and the third time, were successful ( percent); another  students (out of  who applied) were reinstated by the institute’s board of administration.⁷⁸ Protests by Communists at Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers who clung fiercely to proletarianization show how grudgingly class rehabilitation was conceded: “The vast majority of the reinstated—in terms of social position almost all of them are the children of employees—had revealed themselves as negative types before being purged last year. Few used the intervening time to get closer to Soviet society.” In spite of such opposition, the applicants for reinstatement had grounds for optimism. The reinstatement commission at Leningrad Medical Institute went so far as to state that “only academic criteria will influence our decisions.” To judge by the records kept at the Omsk Veterinary Institute, even “class alien” students such as the “son of a cult worshipper,” “the son of a psalm-reader,” and “the son of a noble,” did not hesitate to plead their case, hoping that they might be recategorized as “intelligentsia” and thus earn readmission.⁷⁹ An additional aspect of the liberalization of Narkompros policy involved 

    Table 10 Social Position of the Reinstated Students in Leningrad Leningrad State University Applied Reinstated

Technological Institute

Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers

Mining Institute

132

204

93

36

31

43

18

26

Class Breakdown of the Reinstated Workers

(14) 1

4

1

1

Peasants

(15) 6

—

7

8

Employees

(85) 16

29

10

12

Intelligentsia

(10) 4

9

—

—

Artisans

( 8) 3

1

—

2

Traders

( 0) 1

—

—

—

Children of nonworking elements

( 0) 0

0

0

3

Note: Numbers of applicants for reinstatement to the Leningrad State University are given in parentheses. Source: TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. , , –.

a partial transfer of power from the Communist cell to the university boards of administration. Having acknowledged that the university Party cells had done much to sovietize university administration, the Central Committee’s  directive to “all regional Party organizations supervising educational institutions” stated: While up till now the Party cells had to take into their hands the management of the academic institution and had to operate outside the formal organs governing the university, this state of things cannot be regarded as normal . . . now that life has entered its normal routine. We wish no longer to marginalize organs charged by Soviet law with the responsibility for controlling higher education. Such marginalization deprived university boards of administration of all responsibility and turned them into mere ornament. As a result, the authority of Soviet administration was undermined in general.⁸⁰

According to the revised Central Committee arrangements, admissions became the prerogative of the university boards of administration. The principle of Party control over education was by no means abandoned, however.



Classes Made and Unmade

The real power in the university was now vested with the “Communist factions” (kommunisticheskie fraktsii), made up of card-carrying members from the boards of administration. The Leningrad Party organization explained that “class considerations demand that the management of student affairs will remain in the hands of the Party.”⁸¹ Still, the situation did change somewhat. Communist professors within the Communist factions and rank-andfile Communists in the Party cells did not always see eye to eye in matters of enrollment: the former were generally more liberal than the latter. Alekseev, a proletarianization zealot in the Party cell at Leningrad Agricultural Institute, complained that he now felt marginalized: “The Party faction in the board of administration presented us with a fait accompli. If we disagree they oppress us.”⁸² Almost immediately, the reform in the admissions principles made itself felt in the Tomsk.⁸³ The local Party circuit commission abolished the system of quotas on June , , and decided to break with past habits and actually examine applicants’ academic ability. Class was not entirely moot: peasants from the plow were to be privileged in admissions and White officers and formerly purged students had to be rejected outright. Still, the admissions commission at Tomsk State University reported to Narkompros: the professoriate regards the new instructions as a carte blanche to enroll socially and ideologically alien elements. Part of the professoriate believes that the new policy is a concession to the petite bourgeoisie and that the use of class in admissions at last became obsolete. The professors and the intelligentsia were very much pleased when positions opened up for their children. Among the local tradesmen a unique interpretation of the new policy took root, namely that a special circular had arrived permitting the enrollment of tradesmen’s children into the universities. Authorities, they believe, wish to make merchants pay a specially high tuition in order to help Norkompros balance its budget. Several merchants came to the rector and tried to discuss with him the admission of the “new bourgeoisie.”

The sarcastic tone reserved for class aliens in the report contrasts sharply with the tone of concern used to describe the lot of the proletariat. “The proletarian mass is convinced that it will suffer from the new measures, since it is unable to match the city intelligentsia in academic preparation.” One hardliner who represented the Party cell on the admissions commission condemned the recent pro-intelligentsia trend as an “open door for degenerates”



   

and prided himself on “preserving the class principle and continuing to unmask idle elements.”⁸⁴ By  the role of the Party in determining who was admitted to Tomsk Technological Institute had been dramatically attenuated. The rector of the institute, Professor Gutovskii, and his deputy were nominated by the institute’s professional executive to serve on the admissions commission. In  the commission also included delegates from the circuit Enlightenment Department, the Section of Scholarly Workers, and the Tomsk railroad trade union—all partisans of the liberal academic agenda. The Siberian Narkompros proletarianization zealots complained about the commission’s “inadequate Soviet attitude” and recommended that the delegates be replaced the following year. Reminding Narkompros that throughout the s the professoriate had functioned as a lobby opposed to proletarianization, the Party cell at Tomsk State University vehemently protested against what it perceived as an enhancement of professorial powers: When professors sleep they dream of the exclusion of student representatives from the university’s administrative organs. Why the Moscow student committee endorses such measures is a mystery to us. It might be that in the center it is relatively easy to promote Communists to the positions of rector and dean. But in the provinces we do not have the same human resources. . . . For the foreseeable future students will have to remain the vanguard of Communist influence in the universities.⁸⁵

Because of its colorful details and sardonic style, the Tomsk Technological Institute Party cell report on the same subject is cited here at length: Basically advocating a return to the prerevolutionary admissions standards, the pearl of wisdom professorial representatives rally around is “Pay maximum attention to the academic skills of the applicant and ignore class principle.” The representatives of the professoriate attempted to reintroduce the old grading system or at least, as the rector Savin put it, “small pencil marks that can easily be erased instead of the required ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ grades.” Professors even scrapped the questions on political orientation in Narkompros’s “extended questionnaire,” which, in the words of Gutovskii, smacked of a “search warrant.” Gutovskii sought to repeal the class principle in admissions altogether, pointing out that “there is not a word about it in the ‘Narkompros admissions rules.’ ” As the commission discussed prospective students, Gutovskii went around the table and asked every member if this or that ap-



Classes Made and Unmade plicant should be accepted, trying to catch Party representatives off guard. He and his cronies took advantage of the failure of the admissions commission’s Communist faction to convene in time, and managed to dupe the representatives of social organizations and draw them to its side. Gutovskii alleged that workers of the cult [sluzhiteli kul’ta] should be considered professionals and no longer dismissed as class aliens. Discussing the son of a “big capitalist” who had built a paper-processing factory in Tomsk, he claimed that the applicant should be admitted because his father was not “an ignorant merchant but a person with a university degree (a lawyer) who worked with me in a military-industrial committee and who now works in a soviet institution.” The representative of scholarly workers, Professor Goriachev, claimed in the same vein that “the son of a priest and the son of a laborer are just the same. It is no one else’s business whether one goes to the movies or to church. Did not Soviet Power promulgate the separation of church and state? I could not care less how a given individual earns his living, by trade or by clerical service. If he is academically prepared we have to accept him.” Surprising as it may be, given that he is an astronomer, we have to bear in mind that Goriachev is a religious person.⁸⁶

If Professor Goriachev was irreverent toward the ideals of proletarianization, Professor Tikhonov went much further, calling for the recognition not of the intelligentsia’s equality with the proletariat but for intelligentsia superiority. According to him, “the children of the intelligentsia and the children of employees are the most suitable elements for academic studies.” Tikhonov recalled an experiment that took place in a Tomsk school in which two equally prepared groups were formed, one from “children of simple folk” (prostonarodie) and another from the children of the intelligentsia. “The result was that only  percent of the children in the first group completed the study plan, and even then only after great effort, whereas in the second group the rate of success was  percent.” Blasphemous they may have been, but the words of Tomsk professors definitely indicated a surge in their confidence in . Given the considerable increase in the intelligentsia-employees cohort at Tomsk Technological Institute (from  percent in  to  percent in ), this confidence seems to have been entirely justified. Narkompros’s “laxity” on the intelligentsia was also the subject of much discussion in Leningrad. The report in the  Leningrad Regional Admissions Commission contained a terse critique of the new policies: “The children of the ‘toiling intelligentsia’ find themselves in an advantageous position.



   

They not only enjoy ‘special quotas’ [bronia] the proletariat does not have but are also allowed to compete for the unreserved vacancies on equal terms with ‘children of workers’!” And the Party cell at Leningrade State University fumed: “Given the loopholes in the system and the ingelligentsia privileges this year it is a miracle their dominance was not greater. . . . The existing privileges enjoyed by the intelligentsia must be abolished!”⁸⁷ No matter how many laws and regulations discriminating against mental laborers remained in force (in  only every third intelligentsia applicant was accepted in Leningrad, as opposed to every second worker applicant), the old intelligentsia remained a “privileged” class in the eyes of most Bolsheviks.⁸⁸ While Narkompros’s annual summary insisted that its house was in order and that “the class principle in admissions was not repealed,” cracks and tensions in the official position had surfaced. Alleging that “there are no reasons to assert that there has been a noticeable deterioration of the class composition of the universities,” government officials admitted with the same breath that “this year’s proletarian admissions are the lowest we can allow.”⁸⁹ Lunacharskii’s reflections summarized the dilemmas Narkompros was facing as it searched for the perfect balance between political and economic considerations: It is evident that our students are not well enough prepared. This invites some worries. Entrance into the university can no longer be offered without the fulfillment of certain basic criteria. The worker-peasant youth I met in Moscow and in the provinces anxiously asked: “Should we say farewell to proletarianization? Should we give up on opening the university door to the proletarian masses? Does Narkompros need only well-prepared students from now on? Did everything go to hell?” No, we refuse to accept this possibility. All other conditions being equal, we will always give preference to our own people—the workers and the peasants. . . . But we can no longer dismiss the importance of the overall preparation of our students. Our economy and competition with foreign countries demand that we speak with a resolute voice: “Give us an expert who knows his work!”⁹⁰

Eventually, the propaganda of continuous proletarianization had the upper hand. A consensus was reached that something had to be done to rekindle class discrimination. Despite its promise to honor the spirit of the decree that included the “toiling intelligentsia” in the “proletariat,” in  Narkompros abolished the quotas for “children of mental laborers.” Blamed for sending



Classes Made and Unmade Table 11 Admissions to Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers, 1924–1927 1924

1925

1926

1927

Workers’ faculty graduates

90 (89.0)

130 (80.7)

174 (64.4)

104 (52.0)

Workers from the bench

34 (33.6)

60 (37.3)

143 (52.9)

113 (56.5)

Children of workers

23 (22.7)

32 (20)

6 (2.3)

7 (03.5)

—

—

14 (5.1)

19 (09.5)

27 (26.7)

44 (27.3)

5 (2)

6 (03.0)

Peasants from the plow Children of peasants Employees Children of employees

—

3 (01.8)

37 (14)

30 (15.0)

16 (15.8)

19 (11.8)

23 (8.5)

16 (0.80)

Intellectual laborers

—

Children of intellectual laborers

—

Artisans

—

—

3 (1.1)

Children of artisans

—

—

5 (1.8)

Nonworking elements Children of nonworking elements No information given

— 3 (01.8)

4 (1.5) 26 (9.3)

— 6 (03.0) — 3 (01.8)

—

—

—

—

1 (1.1)

—

—

—

—

—

4 (1.5)

—

Note: Percentages given in parentheses. Source: TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. ; —d. , l. .

too many white-collar applicants to the universities, matriculation commissions were also disbanded. Reflecting these adjustments, the year  saw a resurgence of proletarian enrollment. This rebound is illustrated by the detailed statistical report prepared by Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers, which put the data in a three-year perspective (see table ). More “workers” and “peasants,” fewer “employees,” “intelligentsia,” and “artisans” were admitted in  than in . In some  cases, outright failure in the entrance exams was disregarded “if the candidate came from the right class.”⁹¹ The meticulous  admissions statistics illustrated in the table allow us to make out not only alterations in the numerical preponderance of various “classes” in the institute, but also the construction of class categories themselves. Generally, the social categories used by Narkompros were progressively refined. The appearance in  of the category “peasants from the plow” and the dramatic increase in the category of “workers from the bench” reflect a growing interest in distinguishing proletarians as defined by occupation from proletarians as defined by social origin. Narkompros now heeded



   

the difference between the former (the young applicants “whose consciousness was articulated under the Soviet Power”) and the latter (the older generation “whose mind-set was formed before the Revolution”). In , the categories “artisan” and “intellectual laborers” also made their first appearance, the latter indicating the legitimation of mental labor and the former stressing that even owners of small property could sometimes be regarded as “toilers.” In –, the spectrum of social categories widened, reflecting Narkompros’s growing class inclusiveness during the peak years of NEP. The policy wold soon be dramatically revised and an attempt made to repeat the proletarianization achievements from . The Soviet Union had changed considerably between  and , however. Industrialization had been on the agenda since the Fourteenth Party Congress and the needs of the economy could no longer be compromised for the sake of proletarianization. This paradox was never resolved within the framework of the “NEP settlement in education.” Ultimately, the Gordian knot was simply cut. In the late s the fate of the relatively liberal admissions policies became tied to the fortunes of Right Opposition. Bukharin, Rykov, and their allies supported Narkompros along with its continued control over the preparation of Red specialists. Their political opponents Molotov and Stalin, on the other hand, sided with Vesenkha and its criticism of student class physiognomy. Another vociferous anti-Narkompros lobby was formed by the Party and Komosol radicals, who called for an intensification of class discrimination in education. When Stalin’s faction launched a massive offensive against the intelligentsia during the Shakhty trial, accusing engineers of sabotage and treason, the demise of the NEP compromise in education was clearly imminent. When, at the July  Party plenum, the Central Committee approved the creation of technical educational institutions under Vesenkha’s control, it became apparent that Narkompros had lost the battle.⁹² At around the same time, the Party leadership decided that proletarianization should rise to unprecedented heights and went on to mandate that  percent of the student body should be proletarian. The workers’ faculties were to enroll three thousand “physical laborers” over and above their normal admissions. In addition, numerous Communists participating in the so-called mobilization of the thousands (tysiachniki) were sent to higher institutions for managerial training.⁹³ In May  the Party increased its control over education: now it was stipulated that Party members must con

Classes Made and Unmade

stitute a majority in university admissions commissions. Party representatives were now responsible for the “normal work of the admissions commission,” which meant that they had to fill proletarian quotas at all costs, staving off all professorial countermeasures. In  only about  percent of the members of the admissions commission in Tomsk were Communists; by  this had risen to – percent.⁹⁴ The repoliticalization of class divisions is evident in the Tomsk State University admissions commission report of . Not only were the strict differentiations retained between “workers from the bench” and “children of workers,” and between “peasants from the plow” and “children of peasants,” but the peasantry was also divided into no fewer than six categories: “poor peasants,” “children of poor peasants,” “middling peasants,” “children of middling peasants,” “kulaks” and “children of kulaks.” The appearance of the new “experts” category was no less significant. The fragmentation of the class matrix we found in the mid-s Leningrad Institute of Communication Engineers statistics persisted but its utilization was now reversed: class exclusiveness took the place of class inclusiveness. Whereas in – various categories of peasants and intelligentsia were accepted as nearly proletarian, in the wake of the Shakhty trial and the  grain-confiscation campaign the intelligentsia and much of the peasantry became targets of discrimination. The search for “class aliens” resumed, and admissions were now accompanied by a press conference, which reiterated that children of kulaks, priests and merchants had managed to worm their way into the higher Soviet schools. In  about  percent of the first-year students in Second Moscow University were “unmasked as individuals who should have been disenfranchised.” In September , as their political defeat became apparent, Lunacharskii and his staff resigned. The conciliatory era in Soviet education policy—what we call “the NEP settlement in education”—came to an end.⁹⁵ Numerous historians have explained the onset of Stalin’s Revolution as the gradual consolidation of social groups that supported radicalization of Bolshevik policies. In the argument advanced here, however, the vicissitudes of various classes in the s reflect alterations in the categorization methods used by Bolsheviks rather than an “objective” social change “below.” Social change presumes a gradual and incremental process, but classes can hardly be said to have evolved gradually during the years of NEP. Rather, classes were made and unmade depending on abrupt changes in the Bolshe

   

vik discourse. I believe that the onset of precipitous proletarianization has to be explained by the evolution of the Bolshevik eschatological reasoning. The decision to embark on a path of breakneck industrialization was induced by the Bolshevik diagnosis, made around , that the Soviet economy had returned to its prewar level and that the time had come to leap to the next stage of historical development.⁹⁶ Once this view had come to prevail in Party circles, policies were inaugurated that ended up disrupting the class-tolerant measures of NEP. If the resumption of the proletarian Revolution was to be justified, the Bolshevik class theorists had to show that a pure proletariat had come into existence to support this change in policy. This demonstration was the work we have seen diligently being fulfilled by the Soviet government agencies, statisticians, and activists in the late s. A new stage of history, one that supposedly came closer to full-blown Communism, had to commence.



Proletarianization Contested

6

WHAT DID the non-Bolshevik observers think of the university proletarianization policy? Was it contested? If so, by whom, to what extent, and in the name of what alternatives? In this chapter, we shall examine responses to the Bolshevik proletarianization policy from individuals whose allegiance lay with political parties ranging from the ultra-left to the moderate Kadets. In a nutshell, my thesis here is that rival platforms were not inclined to criticize proletarianization as such, and that the basic Bolshevik goal—the realization of the New Man in a new society—was shared by all who called themselves revolutionaries. Regardless of one’s position in the revolutionary movement, political actors shared the messianic belief in the need to intervene in the formation of the body politic. Any sort of opposition to the principle of social engineering was beyond the horizon of the s Russian political imagination. While acknowledging some important critiques that were leveled against the Bolshevik methods, I will argue that the authors of these critiques shared with the Bolsheviks a set of basic assumptions. Who was the messiah? The “workers”? The “toilers”? The “intelligentsia”? Or all three of these combined? This was the discrete set of questions debated within the revolutionary discourse.¹ Contested terms such as “equality,” “democracy,” “socialism,” “freedom,” even the term “Revolution” itself, all were basically political slogans. The meaning of the terms supposed to legitimate leadership depended on the context and the political affiliation of the speaker, and each party vied for the right to imbue these terms with the content that suited its worldview. Whatever their disagreements, all parties accepted the terms of discussion dictated by revolutionary eschatology. Each 

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political movement maintained that it had identified the Subject of History, and that it alone could elevate this Subject to self-consciousness, enabling the Subject to express itself authentically in the realm of politics and to bring emancipation to humanity. Ivan Petrunkevich, one of the leaders of the Kadets, noted that “liberals, radicals and revolutionaries were distinguished not by political objectives but by temperament alone.”² As we consider the positions of non-Bolshevik revolutionary streams of thought toward Narkompros policy through the lens of discourse analysis, it will become apparent that all sides agreed that this policy was particularist and therefore illegitimate. Why were the Soviet universities in a state of perpetual crisis in the s? Why did Bolsheviks not encounter effective resistance from students? In the eyes of the opposition, the Bolshevik takeover was a temporary “regression” caused by Russia’s “backwardness.” The Menshevik Dan, who endorsed such views, was confident that history would resume its course. Putting a decade of Bolshevik rule into an eschatological perspective, he wrote in , that “even if History decreed that Bolshevism be succeeded by a Fascist-Bonapartist type, that still would not be the final stage of the Revolution, but rather one of its stagnant intervals, one of its temporary zigzags.” The working class, he promised, “will return to the goals it set out for itself in February and March of .”³ Each party, each ideological faction, articulated its own interpretation of the present to vindicate its own version of eschatology. Presenting the Bolshevik victory of  as a veritable historical revelation and themselves as the true messiah, the Bolsheviks accepted the terms of the discussion. Although the Bolsheviks concurred with the unsatisfactory evaluation of s Soviet Russia offered by their messianic critics, they chose to explain this imperfection not in terms of their own mistaken policies but in terms of the natural imperfections intrinsic to the transitional period the Revolution was going through. They were quite sure of being on the right track and maintained that all the problems would be resolved in due course. What made the Russian revolutionary discourse so unusual was that none of the players arrayed along the ideological spectrum viewed a representation of the interests of a particularist social group as a legitimate basis for politics. The liberal belief that the sum total of partisan representations balances out to the general advantage was utterly foreign to Russian politicians. The upshot was the delegitimation of all “representation of interest” and the transformation of political debates within the Russian revolutionary move

Proletarianization Contested

ment into a perpetual unmasking of false universalists. All revolutionary actors participated in the Marxist or quasi-Marxist messianic politics—the politics to end all politics. The denunciation of class interests and the desire to create a polity free of social tensions united the Bolsheviks with their harshest political opponents. It is not in the alleged “backwardness” of Russia and the “narrow-mindedness” of its “power thirsty” Bolshevik rulers that we should search for the roots of the rejection of liberalism but, rather, in the Romantic political philosophy that swept through Russia, and mainly but not exclusively in the Marxist manifestation of this philosophy. The uniformity of revolutionary discourse did not necessarily stem from the coercive power exerted by the Bolsheviks on the population within their control but, rather, from a broad ideological uniformity. This becomes clear once we broaden our scope, considering not only the messianic aspirations of the Bolsheviks but those of a host of revolutionary contenders: the overlapping premises then become apparent. In the present chapter, we come full circle: in another historical setting, and in the face of a new alignment of forces the same discursive solidarities and the same lines of cleavage we have detected in the prerevolutionary debates reappeared. The Bolsheviks were now in power—while their political rivals, despite their own persisting ideological rivalries, shared a common practice of dangerous underground work inside the Soviet Union or a miserable emigrant existence outside it. Everybody was still searching for the class savior. Everybody was still claiming the mantle of messianic leadership. The Mensheviks

During the first half of the s the Menshevik presence in Soviet universities was still significant. Shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power an “AllMenshevik Student Fraction” was formed, a body which published its first anti-Bolshevik statement on November , . About the same time, the Mensheviks established the “Student Socialist Society” in Tomsk. Surviving the Civil War, these organizations were treated seriously by the emigre Menshevik Central Committee. The latter published a circular in  imploring the Social-Democratic organizations still active within Russia to “to conduct intensive work with student youth.” The local committees of the Russian Social-Democratic Union of Working Youth likewise emphasized the impor

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tance of propaganda among students and the imperative to “create Menshevik collectives in universities.” An important youth organization was the Menshevik section of the Social Democratic Moscow Group, established in . Numbering about twenty active members it engaged in a variety of activities: e.g., running independent Marxist circles in the universities, disseminating Menshevik press, and organizing strikes. Dominated by students, this organization had about twenty activists who were largely engaged in the distribution of Menshevik periodicals. Its underground activities continued until  despite frequent arrests of its members.⁴ According to one Bolshevik report, in the early s,  percent of the old students (studenchestvo proshlykh let) were active or passive sympathizers of various petit-bourgeois organizations. A commission created by the Petrograd provincial Party organization in  “to look for ways of coping with counterrevolutionary elements in higher education” recommended that all active Mensheviks be expelled from the universities. Indeed, in the summer of , and then again in April  scores of Menshevik students were purged. Still, during the mid-s, Menshevik groups were quite active in Leningrad as well as in other cities, distributing inflammatory leaflets that vitriolically attacked Bolshevik educational policies. Sixty such Menshevik leaflets were spread in the Petersburg Technological Institute, fifty in the Polytechnical Institute and thirty-eight in the Chemical-Pharmacist one— substantial quantities by the standards of the time. Toward the middle of the decade non-Bolshevik activity in the universities was finally curtailed. Inspection of students’ political loyalties in Petrograd institutes in the winter of - testified to the limits of political hetrodoxy at that time: Mensheviks had only . percent of students behind them, the Menshevik student cells containing five to ten members on the average.⁵ What is most interesting in our context, however, is that the proclamations spread by the Menshevik student organizations leave the impression that this party was no less committed than the Bolsheviks to university proletarianization. It was how the Bolsheviks implemented class discrimination, not the idea behind it, that was criticized by the Menshevik press. According to the Mensheviks, the history of Narkompros policy was a tale of promising beginnings, followed by betrayal of all the key revolutionary ideas in the realm of education. “The start was good—they made higher education free and available for all. But then the Communists turned it into their monopoly. . . . What they call ‘proletarianization’ is nothing other than 

Proletarianization Contested

a policy of handing over the universities to the Communists. The Bolsheviks try to disguise what they do by empty phrases,” but in vain. The Mensheviks also attacked Narkompros use of class categories in university enrollment. They did so not because they believed class was inappropriate as a criterion in admissions, but because the Bolsheviks rendered class “an empty phrase.” The Bolsheviks were accused of having thwarted proletarianization; what should have brought about the enlightenment of “every worker and peasant” —that is to say, of the class as a whole—became a political device benefiting workers loyal to the Party and the GPU: “Not every worker or peasant can enter the university, only those who believe in the Party. The only school remaining for the rest of the proletariat is the school of life—lockouts, unemployment, and jail.”⁶ A Menshevik report on admissions to Leningrad universities continued in this key: “Enrollment has long been completed. . . . The admissions commissions do all they can to provide for their own people. This year the percentage of Party and Komsomol members among the students is even higher than usual. . . . Most of the Party members were exempted from examinations, and those who took them and failed, God forbid, were allowed to try again.” The Menshevik Petersburg Union of Working Youth complained that the new students in the Soviet universities were either declassed elements “who slipped through the pores” or the “politically backward. Real workers can hardly enroll in universities and workers’ faculties.”⁷ The  university purge prompted the Mensheviks to clarify their position regarding Narkompros proletarianization policies. The leaflet that was circulated in the Leningrad universities in May bore the slogan “Proletarians of All Countries Unite,” thus testifying to the Social Democratic persuasion of its authors. The imagined readers—“the students of Petrograd, workers and all the toiling people”—were, thought the Mensheviks, their supporters. The leaflet opened with a harsh condemnation of Bolshevik academic policies: Comrades! Another harsh blow has recently been delivered to the universities. The government has decided to purge , students from Petrograd alone, a fraction of the , total to be purged from institutions of higher education across the Soviet Union. It is evident that the power gained by those who ride the back of the revolutionary tiger cannot satisfy . . . the popular classes’ enormous desire to study. This desire was unearthed by the revolutionary plough. . . . At the peak of its power and reputation, the Bolshevik 

                       dictatorship stole all. The Bolsheviks are emptying the Revolution of its achievements.

The original sin was attributed to the Bolshevik inability to control the rising bourgeois powers: “From the first day of NEP, the number of educational institutions began to shrink. Eventually it fell below even prerevolutionary totals. No end to this deplorable policy, the first victims of which were the universities, has yet been seen. One after another university purges have occurred and now they have reached a sort of climax.” In the Mensheviks’ view, the expansion of socialism—and the concomitant expansion of the academic system during  and the Civil War—was reversed with the general betrayal of the Revolution by the Bolsheviks. Signs of this were the “poor material conditions of student life and the shortcomings in the ideological education of the Party.” The Mensheviks were convinced that the university purge was a political offensive directed against all anti-Bolshevik students: “ ‘Academic activity,’ used as a pretext for the purge, plays hardly any role in what is going on.”⁸ Another Menshevik leaflet, distributed in  by the Student Bureau of the Petrograd Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party, portrayed the GPU as the main inspiration behind the purge: Comrades and citizens, the powers of the GPU have been widened yet again. Waves of senseless repression are sweeping across the country . . . hitting the students particularly hard. In Petrograd universities . . . more than one hundred students have been arrested. . . . Repression takes place in workers’ boroughs, typesetting shops, student dormitories, on the streets and in the barracks. Away with this regime of ignoble terror and extraordinary powers and decrees! Release the arrested! Long live political freedom! Comrade, hang this on a wall or pass it along to someone else.⁹

In this narrative, the Bolsheviks had recourse to GPU repressive apparatus because the only supporters the regime could conceivably have had were those it had bought off. “Even before the purge,” another Menshevik source claimed, “students were offered tuition waivers in exchange for working as spies and provocateurs. The majority refused, but a minority, with unbelievable cynicism . . . branded their foreheads with the mark of Judas for twenty silver rubles and conspired with the GPU.” A Tashkent Menshevik eyewitness observed that the local Communists had discarded all formalities and



Proletarianization Contested

that in the meeting of the social science faculty one of them openly said that “anyone in possession of information that could politically discredit another student should report to the Party cell, even if secretly.” In the Menshevik analysis, the student body was split between a majority who fought for freedom (by and large Menshevik students) and a minority made up of GPU agents and collaborators. Although excitement, discontent, and irritation supposedly reigned among the student masses, this oppositionist mood had to be concealed “due to the proliferation of spies in the universities. No one knows what these gentlemen have to do with academic performance in Kiev’s universities but surely they will oust all those with different opinions from the Communist shrine of scholarship.”¹⁰ Without authentic sympathizers in the universities, the regime could assert its will only through intimidation. All traces of student oppositionism were reported to the GPU: everyone knows that Soviet Power punishes, like the ancient Jewish God, up to the tenth generation. Surveillance in the universities is perfectly organized. One must bow to the efficiency of the Communist cells in this regard. The background of each student is known through and through, including his religious beliefs and the political sympathies of any of his relatives who are abroad. We have been informed that students from Kiev’s universities who were jailed in the past for their support of Social Democracy will be purged —the GPU has obtained their files.¹¹

According to this interpretation, the beneficiaries of the Bolshevik regime were not so much the lower classes as the politically obedient groups. This led Mensheviks to conclude of the Bolshevik proletarianization policy that the Soviet regime was employing not a legitimate social bias but a self-serving political one. The fates of Menshevik supporters at the hands of Narkompros officials was reported to be especially wretched. A third Menshevik leaflet, distributed on behalf of an unidentified underground Social Democratic student organization, was addressed to “all workers, all Democratic students, and all toilers of Petrograd!” Clearly, the laboring classes enjoyed a privileged position in the Menshevik framework. The leaflet went on to assert that “the plight of the workers and the peasants is onerous” and that the proletariat had gained nothing from Bolshevik rule, directing the brunt of the Menshevik critique of Narkompros proletarianization not toward its predilection for



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enrolling workers but toward its failure to live up to its promises in this regard. For the Mensheviks, the problem with Bolshevik educational policies was not excessive class bias but insufficient class bias: Neither the Communists and their spongers nor the children of NEP men are thrown into the streets. Rather, they have been well taken care of. These are the students who do not have two dimes to rub together, the kitchenhelp children who cling to the notion that a Revolution took place, who are dispensable in Narkompros’s eyes. Because they represent a danger to the Bolshevik magnates, they are forced to leave the universities.¹²

The Menshevik pundits insisted that the Bolshevik regime advanced “riffraff, declassed workers, the very kind disdained by Marx and Engels, a passive fruit of degeneration, the rascals of the lowest of social groups. . . . Their profusion among the contemporary Russian proletariat is the result of an insufficient development of capitalism in our country.”¹³ Even the student proletariat had supposedly degenerated, now that it was separated from manual labor and had been turned into a pawn in Bolshevik hands: “A youngster from the working class or the peasantry, passing through the workers’ faculty and the university, drilled to obey authorities, and instilled with the hope that he will get a commanding position, will doubtlessly detach himself from his mother class. Any attempt at criticism or independent organization leads to the student’s purge; initiators of such measures are immediately arrested.”¹⁴ One Menshevik noted that “instead of raising a new generation of revolutionaries the Bolsheviks gave birth to a new generation, marked by neuroses, ignorance, and both physical and mental depravity.” In the Menshevik evaluation, the Bolshevik regime did not deserve to be described as truly proletarian. “We decisively reject the notion that there is a ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in Soviet Russia. This is a lie which fogs the minds of the workers. There is not and has never been any Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Soviet Russia.”¹⁵ Dependent on a new class of “Red bureaucrats,” the Leninist state had to acquire a declassed, Bonapartist class character. A young activist fleshed out this diagnosis in a letter to the Bureau of Menshevik Emigrés: “Now many came to realize that the social basis of Bolshevik Dictatorship narrows, and gradually evolves into a supraclass political system.” It was ostensibly the demoralization of the working class that allowed the Bolsheviks to erect a supraclass political dictatorship of ruthless careerists. But not everything was lost. 

Proletarianization Contested

The Bolshevik impostors could be countered if the real working class could be rallied. “We have to focus on the unification of all the active forces of the proletariat, disregarding factions and differences of opinion in order to defend our class interests at this decisive moment.” The Mensheviks alone could offer “the unity that was necessary.”¹⁶ Thus, sharing with the Bolsheviks the belief in the historical mission of the working class, the Mensheviks could not object to investigation of the students’ class position. This is not to say there was no criticism of classbased student purging. Menshevik reporters voiced outrage at the “unheardof character of the university purge. . . . Students are being thrown out on a range of pretexts such as ‘inadequate public work’ or ‘insufficient time in productive labor.’ ” Yet, it was hardly the principle of class bias that troubled them. The language of class was very much embedded in the Menshevik commentary: The composition of the student social body is complex. . . . The local students are by and large peasants from kulak families, some more rich than others. Having adjusted to the current [class] requirements they wormed their way into the universities by posing as “Soviet peasants.” Kulak children arrive dressed in the traditionally sewn shirts, carrying with them sacks of fat and sugar. To get grades for them is like baking pancakes.

This Menshevik’s resentment of the peasantry is apparent—workers, not peasants, would have benefited from proletarianization had it been properly implemented.¹⁷ Common revolutionary readings of the situation are highlighted when the Menshevik critique of the purge is examined side by side with the praise heaped on the purge in the Soviet sources. The Bolshevik reports on the conduct of the  purge in Leningrad State University inverted the Menshevik class narrative, preserving, however, its insistence on class as a source of meaning. Who was to benefit from proletarianization and who was to lose? This was where the camps differed. What the Mensheviks dubbed “merciless Communists” or “the prospering students” and “the politically indoctrinated Bolshevik loyalists” the Bolshevik press portrayed as “our people, the stalwart lines of proletarians armed with class consciousness and ready to leap to defend the interests of labor at any moment.” While the Bolsheviks maintained that those purged from Leningrad State University were “bourgeois ladies out for a stroll” and “weak-willed elements who dream of apocalypse” the 

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Mensheviks saw them as “ tragic proletarian casualties” who refused to “cooperate” with the Bolshevik tyranny. While the Bolsheviks were proud to expel “the affluent academic intelligentsia which has no use outside the university walls,” the Mensheviks bewailed the injury done to the most conscientious proletarian freedom fighters.¹⁸ According to the Mensheviks, the main victim of the purge was the “democracy” (demokratiia)—“poor students who have to make their own livings and for this reason cannot meet the academic requirements.” Claiming the role of democracy’s true defenders, the Mensheviks identified “democracy” as “the propertyless,” “the deprived,” the “kitchen-help children.” Menshevik émigré organs promoted this understanding of the term when they argued that “the plight of the ‘democracy’—the true proletarian students—is miserable in comparison with the elements labeled ‘proletarians’ by the officials [shtampovanno-proletariatskie].”¹⁹ This Menshevik call for “democracy” appears to be a head-on critique of Bolshevik political philosophy, until it is placed in context where it clearly epitomizes the affinity between the Menshevik and the Bolshevik political vocabulary. When the Mensheviks charged the Bolsheviks with persecuting “democracy,” they were merely repeating their accusation that the regime oppressed the working class instead of defending its legitimate interests. An appeal made by the Menshevik youth to the Western Social Democratic organizations was suggestive in this regard: Why do the Bolsheviks, confident as they are in the stability of their power, not allow the parties of workers and peasants to enjoy political rights?! . . . Why does Soviet Power hasten to meet the demands of native Russian NEP men, but refuse to assist the toiling masses, who are left without anyone to represent them? . . . Socialism means the free, authentic expression of the will of the masses, the embodiment of the toilers’ “democracy.” . . . Without “democracy” the struggle of the working class for socialism is inconceivable.²⁰

In this passage the term “democracy” vacillates between meaning a class and meaning a method of political representation. What is crucial to understand is that the Mensheviks were concerned exclusively with the working-class youth (and the task of securing its proper representation) not with the introduction of formal political equality into the country’s constitution. There were no calls for a system of government guaranteeing formal political equality to the entire Russian population. 

Proletarianization Contested

An interpretation of “democracy” epitomized by the four-tail election system was utterly alien to the Menshevik mind. Couched in Marxist terms, the Menshevik analysis sought positive, not negative freedom. It always qualified “democracy” as a “democracy of the toilers,” imbuing the term with concrete social content. When Mensheviks spoke of a political democracy they were thinking of a system that ensured social equality and the preeminence of the productive part of the population. In Russian social thought “democracy,” one scholar explains, “was juxtaposed from the beginning to constitutionalism or liberalism as understood in the West. ‘Democrats’ and ‘liberals’ were in fact often contrasted, the former portrayed as egalitarian socialists, the latter as English businessmen interested in purely formal liberties for the middle class.”²¹ The political sense of Menshevik “democracy” was drawn from its social meaning. “Democracy” was understood as a social collectivity, the proletariat, a class in need of political leverage if it was to express itself. Whereas liberals used the term “democracy” to denote the rule of the majority (a natural outcome of a representative government), Marxists —and this included both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks—stressed its Greek etymological root: the rule of the demos, the lower classes.²² Martov argued that “democracy” was an important part of the socialist program. What socialism rejected was what Martov called the “democratic illusion”—“the lie of existing democratic republics and monarchies,” which limited class struggle in the name of the “sovereignty of the people.” Although sensible socialist parties, according to the Menshevik argument, had learned that the proletariat should take full advantage of “democratic institutions,” they were not duped by the fiction of “pure democracy.” Clearly, the Menshevik call for “democracy” was miles removed from a plea for the introduction of a liberal constitution. Political equality was seen as meaningless without social equality. Bereft of economic consequences, political freedoms were, according to Martov, tools of enslavement rather than of liberation. “Marxism could not be less concerned with the relative value of such abstract categories as ‘democracy.’ . . . Not because democracy is the ‘means’ and socialism the ‘end,’ or because the ideal of political equality is less ‘high’ than the ideal of social equality, but for one reason only, that the real base of the historical process—the class struggle of the unpropertied against the propertied—leads through the first to the second.”²³ “Democracy,” in the sense of the right of the proletariat to representation 

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in the political arena, was an indispensable facet of socialism. A Menshevik leaflet declared the Bolshevik regime oppressive because it denied true democracy: “A yawning gap separates the Communist party from the working class. The dictators in the Kremlin try to save their skin by concealing this gap with comedies they call ‘inner-Party democracy’ or ‘Lenin’s Levy.’ The hour of political democracy has arrived.” What the Mensheviks preached here was not the abolition of class-based suffrage but a form of suffrage that would at last really benefit the lower classes. Tying “an antidemocratic worldview taking shape within the Communist party” to the Bolshevik “antiproletarian psychology,” the resolution of the  Menshevik Conference presented the opposition to “democracy” and antiproletarianism as synonyms. According to the Menshevik political vision, “democratic” political order would have allowed the Mensheviks—who saw themselves as the only authentic representative of the working class—to assume power in due course. “No wonder the Bolshevik regime decided to wipe out the entire social milieu surrounding our party.”²⁴ There is no indication that the Mensheviks were troubled by the Bolshevik attempt to control the class constitution of the student body, but they certainly disputed the manner in which affiliation with the “democratic camp” was to be determined. How was the worker to be identified? What were his political attitudes? Did class-conscious workers support Bolshevism or Menshevism? These issues defined the pivotal disagreements. Whereas the Bolsheviks believed that supporting the Soviet regime proved a pure proletarian spirit, Mensheviks thought that resisting Communism and supporting their own political organization were touchstones of proletarian consciousness. It is not surprising that lively arguments broke out in the universities over the so-called political literacy exams. In the Menshevik analysis, Narkompros political literacy exams were a farce. One Menshevik student noted sardonically that, in his university, “best measure of the purge is what the Bolsheviks call ‘examination in political literacy.’ It should be called ‘biased questioning.’ ” No less sarcastic, his Moscow peer fleshed out the procedure: A committee member rummages among student papers. . . . Woe to the one labeled “unreliable.” Egyptian curses follow: “What kind of government exists in China?” “Who is Macdonald?” “What is our international situation?” Questions are spat out one after the other. The student tries to answer the best he can. Alas! His fate was decided in advance by GPU.



Proletarianization Contested

The report concluded with the allegation that only students suspected of anti-Bolshevik sentiment were thoroughly examined. According to another Menshevik eyewitness, students did not undergo political enlightenment but, rather, political drilling: “Students memorized everything. Somebody asked me ‘Is the textbook Origins of the Family and Private Property easy to learn by heart?’” The conclusion the Mensheviks drew was that Soviet students had been brainwashed. They absorbed classic texts solely to prove their loyalty to the Bolshevik regime and thereby to advance their careers. Had they really understood what they were reading, they would have realized that the Menshevik analysis of the political situation, and not the vacuous Bolshevik propaganda, represented the truth.²⁵ The Mensheviks maintained that those who had managed to survive the academic purge were thoroughly ignorant of politics. To the Mensheviks, this was understandable—the Bolsheviks had to keep students in the dark, otherwise they would join the opposition to the regime. The charge that political education was a medium for the bolshevization of the student body was seconded by reports from Moscow. A Menshevik observer there described what was officially labeled the Colloquium on Political Literacy, which was in fact a veritable purgatory designed to convert a student to Bolshevism: youngsters just leaving the school bench learn by heart Bukharin’s ABC of Communism. Without blinking an eye they tell you that the Paris Commune failed because the proletariat did not take over the banks and refrained from employing terror; that the Great French Revolution ended unsuccessfully due to the absence of a proto-Bolshevik party that would have taken things into its own hands; that the Second International disintegrated because of treasonous social-patriots, and so on. A student in his sixth year failed the examination because he did not know how revolutionary committees were formed!²⁶

The Mensheviks declared that the students who wanted to survive had to praise the Bolshevik record and analyze world history through the Bolshevik lens, that Narkompros propagated prejudice instead of instructing students in real (read: Menshevik) socialist traditions. This was sad but natural—the Bolsheviks betrayed socialism. “When one of the girls in the peculiar Colloquium on Political Grammar was asked what the Second International was, her reply was ‘A song’!” The implication was that for the Bolshevized students the Internationale, for decades a linchpin of the European socialist or-



                      

ganization, was nothing more than a hymn they had been conditioned to repeat, unaware of its history or real significance.²⁷ The teaching of history, the historical events that had to be passed from generation to generation and the relative importance of historical processes, dates, and persona were issues that generated much debate. The Mensheviks claimed that Narkompros was rewriting and falsifying history. Rechristening socialist history as the “history of Communism” was only the beginning of the process. The Menshevik press insisted that political erudition was not important to students who were trusted members of Party cells. Those who were Komsomol members were exempt from the purge “although they had not had a decent political education.” One of them reportedly had no difficulties with the purge commission though “he did not have the foggiest idea of what the Versailles Treaty was. When asked to name a republic in the Caucasus he said, ‘Czechoslovakia.’ ”²⁸ By contrast, the Bolshevik press portrayed political education in the Soviet universities as an effective tool in refining student consciousness. In this scenario, Soviet students were not bourgeois careerists who memorized Party dogma to get ahead but proletarians who were pushed to the correct answers by life itself. Here it was the uprooted, socially disoriented Menshevik student intelligentsia that was detached from production, politically illiterate, and interested only in abstract academic expertise. When the announcement of the purge “drastically altered this situation,” the Bolsheviks were pleased. “Awakened” to the importance of political issues, students “started reading newspapers and books. Everyone’s attitude toward politics changed. Many expressed a wish to enroll in political schools.” The same Bolshevik went on to describe the atmosphere in the dormitories: The student room is noisy. . . . Fellows leave the purge commission with red faces, sweaty. “Well, what did they ask?” is the anxious inquiry of those who have not yet entered the purgatory. “Nothing special . . . . Some on the international movement, a little on the Komsomol. Trifles!” is the joyful response of those coming out. The Komsomol member who is genuine in his convictions has nothing to be afraid of. In the hall guys ask one other, “Tell me, when was the first Party congress held?” “In !” “How many conferences took place in Moscow province?” “Five.”²⁹

In the Bolsheviks’ own interpretation the history of the Leninist party was not substituted for the history of Russian Social Democracy but was inte

Proletarianization Contested

grated into that history. Communism was presented to students as a natural outgrowth of the party founded by socialists in . Familiarity with the origins and ideology of the Soviet government was, in this scenario, indispensable to any proletarian. Here we find none of the blind obedience and the wish to oblige the GPU’s rulers ascribed to the Communist students by the Mensheviks. Once again, when we are able to peer through the smoke produced by the pugnacious and quarrelsome Marxist rhetoric, what emerges is that no one disputed the value of “class consciousness.” The issue the two rival Marxist parties were wrestling over was not whether consciousness was important as such but merely what specific items this consciousness had to contain. Whereas the Bolsheviks regarded familiarity with the Soviet constitution and the historical role of the Communist Party as essential, the Mensheviks prioritized the general history of socialism and the international workers’ movement. Neither side questioned the function and the importance of political education; the disagreement was over which agencies should perform this function and which issues should be encompassed by political literacy. The shared agendas were hardly surprising, as both camps were committed to fostering proletarian self-awareness. In other words, and here we come back to the terms of the discussion in the first part of this book, the Mensheviks clashed with the Bolsheviks over who would be recognized as the true intelligentsia and the bearer of proletarian consciousness, and who would be seen as false pretenders to this role. Since the Bolsheviks, viewed from the Menshevik perspective, did not enlighten the proletariat, they could not claim to be the proletarian vanguard. Mensheviks equated their own position with proper enlightenment and reckoned the Bolsheviks had to be dedicated to keeping students in the dark: “One of the chief goals the Communist educational policy set itself is the purge of those students who show a tendency toward political free thinking, or, as Chekhov would have put it, of ‘individuals with ideas in their head.’ ” The “tragic fate” of the student intelligentsia, “those who had been neither created for physical work nor prepared for it by previous life experience,” was a reflection of the larger tragedy: the world’s first proletarian revolution had occurred in a backward country.³⁰ The campaign against the intelligentsia and the repression of Menshevism were, from this perspective, two sides of the same coin. According to the Menshevik observers, many of the questions asked by Narkompros purge 

                      

commissions were designed to detect and punish sympathies with the intelligentsia. Answers to questions such as “What is your attitude toward Vekhi [a high-minded collaboration between the governing powers and many leading Russian intellectuals]?” determined whether a student would be classified as “trustworthy” or “unreliable.” Intelligentsia students “were forced to pay tuition and sometimes even ousted from the university,” the Mensheviks reported. “Among them were numerous members of the Russian Social Democratic Party and its sympathizers. One student was purged for being a ‘Menshevik’s wife’!”³¹ The Menshevik reporter’s sympathies for an oppressed intelligentsia clearly arose out of what he perceived as an apparent Bolshevik tendency to equate this group with Menshevism. In this account, Jewish students in particular came under suspicion, since the Menshevik intelligentsia had many individuals of this religious background. The Mensheviks suggested that the Bolshevik regime had returned to the notorious anti-Jewish policies of the tsars. A worker who joined the Menshevik party was reportedly asked by a Cheka investigator: “ ‘How did you wind up in the party of all these lawyers, doctors and Jews?’ ” The Mensheviks marshaled abundant evidence that the purge commissions specifically targeted Jews. The student purge in Kiev, a local Menshevik correspondent wrote, “affected mainly Jews; among the purged,  percent are Jews and only  percent Russians. The pretext is, one might expect, that the social status of the Jews is incompatible with Narkompros requirements. Even the Communists admit, however, that anti-Semitism, which flourishes in Ukrainian universities, played a role. As the saying goes, ‘Ukrainians are favored, and Jews are kept under.’ ” Menshevik reportage firmly embedded the targets of Bolshevik repression in the metonymic chain Jews—intelligentsia—Mensheviks. Poletika, a Jewish student sympathetic to Social Democracy, portrayed the  student purge as a crusade against the Jewish intelligentsia. “In  lightning suddenly struck: an ‘authoritative commission’ was established at the university for the eviction of ‘class aliens’ and ‘ideologically hostile’ persons. . . . Behind this smoke screen a purge of nonproletarian intelligentsia was taking place. . . . The general targets were the four-eyed students. The purge was a tragedy, a massacre of the young intelligentsia.”³² According to the Mensheviks, Narkompros was persecuting the students identified as thinking for themselves because it suspected them of being members of the true intelligentsia, people who might find a way to the hearts of 

Proletarianization Contested

the workers and expose the Bolshevik imposture to the proletarian masses. A Menshevik leaflet declared: the only remaining ray of light in the cultural wilderness of NEP Russia was the universities. But the Bolsheviks wanted to erase this last seditious corner from the face of earth so that the tranquillity of the cemetery would not be disturbed. Their dictatorship would sever itself even from the small portions of the intelligentsia that remain in the universities! The intelligentsia has become absolutely superfluous in a Russia ravaged by the Bolsheviks.

The leaflet castigated the Bolsheviks for hoisting a “socialist flag” under false premises; the Bolsheviks were neither enlightening the toiling population nor creating a workers’ intelligentsia. Proletarians in search of knowledge were incarcerated “as hundreds and thousands of students fill the hospitable Russian jails.” Employing biblical images in a lament for the “thirty thousand students forced into the streets,” a Menshevik leaflet compared the university purge to the Apocalypse and its Bolshevik perpetrators to “Moloch,” the vile deity to whom the God-loving, long-suffering intelligentsia “pays tribute.” This was rhetoric aimed at a reader versed in Marxist eschatology, a reader who knew that the Apocalypse brought to Russia by the Bolshevik pretenders was destined to give way over time to the true messiah.³³ Identifying themselves as the messianic intelligentsia for whom all Marxists were waiting, the Mensheviks maintained that the working class would sooner or later recognize them as its savior. Yet another Menshevik leaflet issued during the  purge called for true proletarian consciousness: We, Social Democratic students, appeal to the working masses. We call all those who continue to cherish the revolutionary achievements to voice their protest. Away with the privileges of those who have Party cards! Let everyone join the struggle under the banner of Social Democracy! Long live free and open higher education!

The leaflet addressed the “general working masses,” the only group that could function as the agent of history. This specific concern with the working class, identified as “democracy” and with the right of the Mensheviks to speak in its name, was restated in unequivocal terms by the Menshevik bureau of the Central Committee in : We have to focus on unifying all the active forces of the proletariat on defending its class interests at this decisive moment. . . . Let us unite under the 

                       banner of the struggle for “democracy” and for the freedom of workers’ organizations! Our party’s platform is the only one that makes such unity possible!³⁴

True Marxists, the Mensheviks refused to attribute an independent importance to the academic arena. They believed that the outcome of a general class struggle would determine the fate of the Menshevik intelligentsia, as well as that of the working class it represented. Events not only in the Soviet Union but throughout the world would eventually make themselves felt in every factory and every university. For the time being, the working-class cause unfortunately suffered a retreat. Ostensibly addressing “the students of the city of Petrograd,” a leaflet distributed by the Russian Social Democratic Party discussed the conditions of the working class in general: “Everything is done . . . at the expense of the working class. Wages are being lowered and the workday is being lengthened. Enormous efforts are being invested in liquidating the representative of the working class, the Russian Social Democratic party.” The leaflet went on to argue that the Bolshevik suppression of free higher education was only one part of a scheme to injure the Russian working class. True workers were banned from studying because the Bolsheviks feared that workers who achieved consciousness in the universities would gravitate toward the Menshevik camp: “The Bolsheviks realize that the widespread education of workers would increase the independence of the masses and foster in the masses a drive for an autonomous mass organization opposed to that of their self-styled guardians. [To preempt this, the regime] leaves the lower-class mass in ignorance and turns education into a special privilege of the Communists and the bourgeois kinds.”³⁵ An underground Menshevik student proclamation stated that “the general decline in the conditions of the proletariat led to the Bolshevik success in intimidating and demoralizing a segment of the young. The youth’s dependency on the class struggle, on the mood and the activism of the battling classes made the university purge possible.” The Mensheviks were confident that the student demise was only temporary. “We should never evaluate student life in isolation. . . . With the general upsurge of the workers’ movement students will gain ground in their struggle for education and rights. Our basic question is: What path are the working class and the peasantry to take in the class struggle now? If their resistance to Bolshevism grows, the possibility of student purges should not inspire fear. All the notorious meth-



Proletarianization Contested

ods of the Cheka will look like schoolboys’ pranks.” Within the Menshevik eschatological vision, when history had completed its inexorable course, Menshevism would be vindicated. Students armed with the correct Marxist theory could already see the seeds of their future glory: The invigorating discontent in the working class milieu is precisely the vital juice that will fuel the student battle against Bolshevism. Class struggle is seeping into the universities. . . . The socially active students must gather their strength, join with the working class and continue the battle as a united front.

The leaflet’s conclusion exuded the firm belief that the eventual proletarian emancipation would correspond to a Menshevik scenario: “We will win because the future is with us!” An underground Menshevik leaflet asserted that the “spontaneous experience” of the struggle against state capitalism “was leading the workers . . . toward a Social Democratic consciousness. The task of the Menshevik party was to channel that amorphous labor unrest into a powerful and well-coordinated labor movement.”³⁶ Since it validated failure and insisted upon the necessarily temporary nature of political debacles, Menshevik eschatology resisted the demoralizing effect of setbacks. When a student challenged a Menshevik correspondent with the claim that “your doctrines do not move forward in step with the changing times,” the correspondent’s response showed he was not in the least disconcerted. The Menshevik analyst never doubted that there was only one useful tool of historical analysis—Marxism—and that this tool had to be preserved against Bolshevik heresies.³⁷ In fact, the main concern of the Mensheviks was that the Bolshevik triumph might undermine Marxism’s reputation among workers. Dan voiced this anxiety in : “The decade-long Bolshevik dictatorship might be presented by some as indisputable evidence of the bankruptcy of all the damned ‘isms’ with which the lower classes, like guinea pigs under the knife of social experimentation, have been force-fed. Karl Marx and the very idea of socialism might be held responsible.”³⁸ The distortion of Marxism in the hands of the Bolsheviks meant that the Mensheviks had to exercise great care to preserve the purity of Marxism, lest the proletariat be stripped of its messianic weapon. Because of a common eschatological scheme, the Mensheviks had no in-



                      

dependent intellectual resources through which to critique Bolshevik academic policies. As several examples above show, the Menshevik charges against the Bolshevik regime presented the s as a step backward in the eschatological route endorsed by both groups. According to the Mensheviks, the Bolshevik regime was an instance of Russian backwardness; the Revolution had degenerated and the usurpation of political power by the declassed “NEP elements” had become possible. Despite their scathing attacks, the Mensheviks never questioned the basic tenets of Bolshevism—the ethical superiority of the proletariat, the negation of “formal democracy,” and a skepticism vis-à-vis academic autonomy. The problem with the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks believed, was not their Marxist ideology but their betrayal of the key Marxist truths, truths to which the Mensheviks remained absolutely loyal. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)

In the early s the Socialist Revolutionaries fielded university cells of their own. SR activists engaged in such shows of political strength as student rallies, political speech making, and the distribution of party literature. They showed considerable skill in infiltrating Bolshevik Komsomol organizations within higher education. As late as , – percent of university students were members of what the Bolsheviks referred to as “petit bourgeois organizations.” It is difficult to assess how many of these were SRs. The Menshevik youth leader Till’ believed that the SR party had been “robbed of its only concrete and popular demand by the Bolshevik Land Decree, and therefore had less to offer the young than Social Democracy.” Yet continuing influence of the SR-controlled student zemliachestva (mutual help societies based on common place of origin) casts serious doubt on such statements. In  the SR delegates to the Socialist International claimed that they represented the most popular free party in the Soviet Union.³⁹ An examination of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) response to university proletarianization would take us beyond the limits of orthodox Marxism, but an analysis of SR writings from the s reveals a commitment to much of what was normally associated with this system of thought. Just like the Marxists, the SRs were committed to the New Man whom they envisioned as an internally harmonious creature to be vivified by the revolutionary educational system. Sukhomlin, for example, described “socialism of the 

Proletarianization Contested

future as an expression of human creativity, of a Man-creator, healthy in body and soul.” The epigones of Russian Populism, SRs were usually described as proponents of voluntarism, but the professed adherence of these writers to the Marxist dictum that “practice determines consciousness” narrowed the gap between Populism and Marxism.⁴⁰ Consider the SR view of the social transformation undergone by the intelligentsia, the “soul” of the Russian Revolution. As we trace the analysis the SRs offered, we can appreciate both the affinities and the dissonances between the eschatologies of the Marxists and the Socialist Revolutionaries. The SR Central Committee explained that objective living conditions inevitably debased Soviet intelligentsia: The most important variable in the life of any social group is its source of income. The intelligentsia is no exception: what it does affects how it thinks. . . . Happily or not, the intelligentsia has to come to terms with existing conditions in the Soviet Union. The need to make ends meet has meant moral degradation, and new patterns of daily existence have transformed the psychological makeup of the intelligentsia. Narrow professional interests have inevitably emerged. Coiled in Soviet bureaucratic chains the Russian intelligentsia is now marked by inertia and unconscious conservatism.

The link made between living conditions and political attitudes would not have embarrassed any Marxist, and the author even proclaimed that the determinist underpinnings of his analysis contained an “everlasting truth.” At the root of the trouble was “not the direct bribery of the intelligentsia leadership, but a more subtle process—the provisioning of the entire Soviet intelligentsia by the state and the consequent link between the moral consciousness of the intelligentsia and the interests of the government.” Having reiterated the Menshevik claim that the Bolshevik regime weakened the population, the author concluded with a declaration that the Soviet intelligentsia had forfeited its right to represent the lower classes of Russian society: The muzhiks slowly perish, beseeching the intelligentsia for help all the while. Nearby, are the workers, tied up and down, bereft of independent class organizations, unsure whether they are directed by “soviets” or by “capitalists.” . . . When Petrograd workers went on strike and demonstrated in support of Kronstadt . . . the slogan of the intelligentsia was “Let us keep body and soul together.”⁴¹



                      

An outline of Socialist Revolutionary eschatology emerges here: the Bolshevized crypto-intelligentsia had betrayed the revolutionary masses; when the intelligentsia was permitted to return to the truth, it would lead the “muzhik” and the “worker” to the promised land. Russia badly needed SR guidance if it was to find its way back to the high road of history. The basic conceptual framework of this party, with its emphasis on relations between social groups and its belief in the universalist mission of the intelligentsia, was quite close to Marxism. To be more specific, the SR critique of the decadent Soviet regime sounded much like a Menshevik critique. There is, however, one important distinction: the SRs defined the class-messiah more broadly than did the Mensheviks and included the “peasantry” alongside the “proletariat” as an equal—not inferior—partner.⁴² Furthermore (and here the Populist heritage asserted itself ), the intelligentsia was assigned a particularly exalted role. Socialist Revolutionaries evinced a strong interest in the class nature of the new intelligentsia. In his report on the student purge, an SR eyewitness emphasized that he did not want to waste time drawing hackneyed comparisons with the persecution of the liberal intelligentsia by the despotic tsarist state. No, he maintained, what was happening in the Soviet Union was of a totally different order, since the victim was no longer the old bourgeois but the young socialist intelligentsia: It is a mistake to think that the present campaign is waged against the bourgeois intelligentsia. Not in the least! The Communists themselves have become thoroughgoing bourgeois, which no doubt explains their generous treatment of bourgeois intelligentsia. Take a glance at the faces in Bolshevik portraits. What fat, complacent and content faces are these! They sure stuffed their stomachs in their years in power. Their glossy faces are neat and tidy! How this Communist oligarchy resembles the bourgeois ministers of Western Europe.

The SRs essentially repeated the Menshevik motif of the degeneration of the Revolution and the transformation of the new rulers into something very close to their bourgeois predecessors. Having noted that the SRs and the Bolsheviks had spent their infancy in the same cradle, and that both were people’s movements led by the revolutionary intelligentsia, the SR émigré daily emphasized that following the revolution the Bolsheviks had degenerated: “The Soviet oligarchy is made up of declassed proletarians who became



Proletarianization Contested

businessmen, speculators, and factory owners. . . . Through a sort of inertia, their lips still mumble something about World Revolution, but they are increasingly cautious about such things.”⁴³ The underlying contention was that Narkompros had transformed higher education from a crucible of the revolutionary intelligentsia into a crypt. To hear the Socialist Revolutionaries tell it, the Soviet universities had become a hotbed for cultivation of a careerist, bourgeois intelligentsia: “Communists have first priority in enrollment, followed by individuals with Party and trade union recommendations. The remaining citizens come last. . . . The cost of higher education is so high that only the children of bourgeois speculators stand a chance of graduating.” The universalist convictions of the student intelligentsia and its commitment to the Revolution were lost, or so the SRs believed. Promoted by Soviet Power, the new intelligentsia became its handmaiden: “The new type of student has narrow, provincial horizons. . . . He has gained admission to the university, as he well knows, thanks to the recommendation of a Communist cell, so he arrives in Moscow psychologically primed to come to terms with Soviet Power.” In the same spirit, the SR leader Viktor Chernov stated that the Komsomol system of “benefits and privileges” was introducing “depravity” into the student body. The SRs claimed that, whereas they were loyally representing the “toiling masses,” similar claims made by the Bolsheviks were empty phrases, flatly contradicted by their persecution of their political opponents: “socialist youth organizations in the universities were closed as a result of Lunacharskii’s decree.”⁴⁴ Even as they watched students being methodically corrupted, the SRs proudly and insistently upheld the mission of a messianic intelligentsia. When an anonymous SR publicist referred to the  student purge as a “crusade against the intelligentsia,” he made a clear distinction between the pseudointelligentsia (nothing but a tool in the hands of the Bolsheviks) and the true intelligentsia (the target of Bolshevik persecution): The intelligentsia proper—this is to say all independent thinkers—are treated as an enemy to be eradicated. The Bolshevik crusade against the intelligentsia has started blazes all over Russia. It is, of course, politically motivated. Since there were few Communists among its ranks, the student body was not immune to being purged. Communist cells in the universities thrive on those students who want to bolster their careers and have no use for idealistic students.⁴⁵



                      

The word “students” had for the Socialist Revolutionaries a heroic ring, thanks to the glorious contribution students had made to the revolutionary movement during its Populist stage. As a clandestine  Moscow SR student proclamation put it, “students have always been an accurate barometer of political upheavals in Russia.” Inevitably the majority of Soviet students failed to live up to such standards, SR observers of the Soviet academic scene noted: “The universities are crowded, but include few real students; a student body capable of independent action has ceased to be.” Such comments echoed a basic postulate of Marxist social analysis: if an agent acts contrary to the political behavior expected of his “social nature,” his authenticity has to be denied.⁴⁶ From the perspective of the SRs the Bolshevik project of proletarianization was lamentable not because of its radicalism but because of its conservatism. The problem lay not with the de jure discrimination in favor of the proletariat (this policy, in the SR view, was proclaimed but never implemented) but with the de facto discrimination in favor of the bourgeois classes. Despite all appearances, “during the student purge social origins were often disregarded. If blacklisted by Communist cells, even workers and peasants were expelled.” Clearly, the SRs had nothing against the language of class or an intrusive state so long as the goals were the eradication of social injustice: “If only most students will come from the toiling classes, the ideology of the working class will find a path to the student’s mind and heart”; “The existence of a free higher education will be secured only by the toiling people of Russia.”⁴⁷ Sukhomlin, a spokesman for the SRs, endorsed the role of the state in social engineering even more explicitly: “SR policy has nothing to do with the policy of bourgeois liberalism, which shuns any state intervention.” It is remarkable that in , by which date the Bolsheviks were firmly in command, Sukhomlin’s main concern was to distinguish the SR position not from Marxism but from liberalism. The trouble with proletarianization, according to the SRs, was that it was a disguise to promote a cynical Communist takeover: “ ‘Proletarianization’ is more than just ‘Communization’; it is an outright death sentence on higher education. Mercilessly carried out by the Bolsheviks . . . the system of stipend distribution and dormitory assignment is, in theory, based on ‘proletarian origins.’ In practice, it is a cover for the lawlessness of Communist commissions.”⁴⁸ Sergei Zhaba, the leader of the SR students in Petrograd, exemplified his party’s ambivalence toward the “new proletarian students.” Zhaba explained 

Proletarianization Contested

that in founding the workers’ faculties Narkompros had an ulterior motive, namely “to create cadres of the Bolshevik intelligentsia and to lay the basis for a loyal and powerful group within higher education.” Although drawn from the ranks of the proletariat, workers’ faculty students became Bolshevik pawns. “Once they had been put through a political filter and molded by harsh discipline, they turned into an obedient tool in the hands of Narkompros.” Zhaba’s overall impression was that the new intelligentsia were careerists loyal to the regime. “It is not a coincidence,” he concluded, “that Soviet students resembled businesslike Americans.”⁴⁹ The émigré SR press duplicated this dichotomy between true proletarians and the careerist elements within the student body. An underground SR correspondent elaborated: Communists put their wager on the most backward layers of the working class. This is their one and only source of strength. . . . On the one hand we have the worker masses who are constantly threatened by unemployment, and on the other we have workers with secure incomes and Party positions. “You want to eat? Join our ranks,” the Communists say as they thrive on people’s poverty and drag our working class into an abyss.⁵⁰

The Bolshevik counterfeit proletarianization, which the SRs called the “Communization” of the universities, was a new version of the unholy alliance between despotic power and backward social groups. After striking a sharp contrast between the true working class, now purged from the universities, and the “backward workers” whom the Bolsheviks were promoting into their cells, an anonymous SR reporter drew a historical parallel between the declassed students and the infamous workers who had cooperated with Zubatov’s agents provocateurs. “Like the Zubatovshchina, the Bolshevik educational policy turns what was supposed to be the means to workingclass emancipation into the fetters of its enserfment. . . . Recall that the Zubatovshchina was, first and foremost, a crusade against the revolutionary intelligentsia that based itself on the most backward elements of the working class.”⁵¹ Another SR voice added wryly that the Bolsheviks “search for exactly the kind of intelligentsia that clings to them,” an intelligentsia that originated in the backward, declassed proletariat, ready to grovel before the Bolshevik Party. In  an SR student reported from Moscow that the student body was divided into two camps: “One group is the Communists and their spongers, a unique aristocracy living in dormitories, enjoying stipends, 

                      

and implementing the so-called Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and the other group is the student mass, which is plunged into a pure academicism. . . . The decline of revolutionary energy among students is evident.” The true proletariat had been subdued with the use of force and the Bolsheviks were ruling without any tangible social support. “The relationship between the Soviet government and the working people took on the clear form of open exploitation based on military might.” ⁵² One may note parallels between concern shown by Socialist Revolutionaries for the “toilers” and the Menshevik concern with “democracy.” In fact, the SR conception of “democracy” was steeped in the same social content as the Menshevik. In a large article on the subject published in  the SR pundit Kheraskov claimed there were “two types of ‘democracy’—the formaljuridical one,” based on the external sense of the term, and the substantive one, based on “socio-ethical considerations”: The essence of “democracy” lies not in its external form but in its “spirit.” Therefore, it is impossible to equate “democracy” with political “democracy” alone. . . . The emancipation of the laborer is an elemental goal which logically precedes political emancipation. Only the “Declaration of the Rights of Labor” reveals to the contemporary consciousness the essence of the “Democracy of Rights.” . . . The victory of the laborer is the victory of “democracy.” The transformation of a “Man-Citizen” into a “Man-Laborer” is what is meant by the transition to “democracy.” . . . Man is better aware of his true being as a “laborer” than as a “citizen.” Only as a “laborer” does he come to know how to govern himself.

Kheraskov went on to add a crucial caveat: “the contemporary regime in Russia is, of course, not a ‘democracy’ but a vestige of the past, an ugly combination of a Pugachevshchina and an Arkacheevshchina.” Although it seemed sensible to him that Western laborers would admire Soviet Russia, he insisted that Bolshevik political authoritarianism was what “attracts Western European workers. The latter naively confuse the demagogic dictatorship of the Party leaders with the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in which they find a democratic element: the idea of workers’ power, that is, the political emancipation of the most downtrodden part of the population.” The problem with the Soviet constitution, according to Kheraskov, was not its proletarian bias but that this bias was never really brought to bear.⁵³ Like their Marxist rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries claimed to be de

Proletarianization Contested

fenders of “democracy.” They had made a commitment to the “toiling masses” (“democracy” in the social sense of the phrase) and to a constitution that would put them in the position of the leaders of these masses (“democracy” in the political sense of the term). Narkompros policy was, the SRs explained, the opposite of “democracy” in that it represented an onslaught against lower-class students and the student organizations that truly represented them. In the words of an SR leaflet printed in Moscow: Every expression of free thought among students is mercilessly strangled. . . . Communists are ubiquitous and they throttle initiative. Students have been expelled for being “SR propagandists.” With every week that goes by our comrades’ struggle for freedom is met with greater violence. Not a week passes without the repression of a circle, an arrest, a home search, and other manifestations of the dictatorship of the “Proletariat.”⁵⁴

When the SR leaflet made reference to the canonic Dictatorship of the “Proletariat,” only the final word was set in quotation marks. The intention here was to point out that the signified to which pointed the signifier “proletariat” had undergone a shameful metamorphosis. The brunt of SR sarcasm landed not on the Bolshevik instantiation of their dictatorial political organizations but on the Bolsheviks’ failure to make good on their rhetoric and to allow these organizations to represent the true proletariat.⁵⁵ Just like the Mensheviks, the SRs predicted that the difficult times would inevitably fall away because of history’s fundamental drive forward, with an SR messiah leading the way. A leaflet issued by SR students insisted that a small revolutionary nucleus continued activity within the Soviet universities. “Withstanding all repression, our ‘student democracy’ still constitutes an active opposition. Almost everywhere there are student groups, united by the platform of democratic ideology and confident in the spontaneous development of social forces. Their actions confirm their socialist character.” In this scenario, the SR student cohort was destined to prevail because it alone held to the correct interpretation of eschatology. “Although apathy among students still runs deep . . . we will eventually see the results of our labor in the universities.” No less committed to universalism than their messianic rivals, the SRs were equally precluded from undertaking an analysis of the academic scene taken in isolation. They too insisted that the student movement was tightly knit into the development of class struggle: “The past year [– ] taught us how closely we are linked with the toiling people. We are 

                      

now conscious that we are but a part of the toiling group struggling for free higher education. . . . From underground we send greetings and urge all to struggle for ‘democracy’ and socialism!”⁵⁶ According to the SRs, the struggle of the student youth had real resonance only when it was a response to the more general, national class struggle. Reflecting on the tasks of the youth organizations, Zil’berberg never lost sight of the primacy of class over such other determinants as age or vocation. Let us remember that a major task that lies ahead of us is the narrowing of the gap between the studying and the working youth. The socialist youth has to be conscious of its unity with the workers’ movement. . . . We must go to the people and strive for intimate contact with the broad layers of working, peasant, and student youth! . . . Even if they are small at the moment, our groups will spring up wherever youth exists, in the villages and the factories, in schools and universities.⁵⁷

An SR student was ideally either a “toiler” himself or a propagandist among toilers. The Socialist Revolutionary publicists were not interested in “academic freedom” and “student equality” in their own right. In their view, the university’s role was not the narrow one of preparing specialists, but the universalist-messianic one of preparing the true intelligentsia that would open the eyes of the toiling masses. “The intelligentsia is . . . the ‘mind of the nation,’ better able to comprehend the interests of society and the nation taken as a whole than any other group. It is the group best suited to exercising the functions of teaching and enlightening.”⁵⁸ This is why the future of the intelligentsia “cannot be apolitical . . . and forget the people,” maintained an anonymous SR, who claimed that the “real” students would reemerge and become conscious of their revolutionary tasks: “Together with the members of a ‘democratic civil society’ they will struggle against the Communist yoke.” This messianic vanguard was to come from those parts of the lower classes who had not been corrupted by Bolshevism: “The buds of the genuine intelligentsia lie in village huts, in factories, mills, and unheated student rooms.” Here we meet again the tripartite SR messianic subject: the peasantry, the working class, and the intelligentsia were to fuse and reassert themselves in the near future.⁵⁹ There were indeed many similarities between the SR and the Menshevik critiques of Bolshevism. Both parties shared an eschatological view of his

Proletarianization Contested

tory and attributed messianic qualities to the lower classes, singling themselves out as the heralds of consciousness. Neither party condemned the Bolshevik emphasis on class; in the s the bourgeoisie was still regarded as the common enemy against which all revolutionary parties had to unite, and the Bolshevik regime was attacked only when it seemed to be fostering capitalist restoration. Disagreements between the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries were of a secondary order and had to do with the exact identity of the messianic class. The Mensheviks were obedient to Marxist dogma in seeing only the “industrial proletariat” as the true subject of history, whereas the SRs expanded the revolutionary cast to include all “toilers.” In particular, the SRs displayed a real sympathy with the peasantry, which they felt had been victimized by an urban-oriented Bolshevism. In the pages of the émigré press, leaders such as Chernov and Baian criticized the urban Bolshevik hegemony over the villages, and the leading agrarian theorist of his day, Maslov, accused the workers of outright egotism: By comparison to the proletariat, pampered by the Soviet regime, “the peasantry is without rights.” But, symptomatically, Maslov immediately qualified his statement: “The same of course can be said for the entire population of contemporary Russia, except for the holders of power and the members of the . . . organization on which the power of the Communist party relies.”⁶⁰ Maslov did not want to be understood as somebody who establishes internal hierarchy within the messiah—in the eyes of the SRs, all toilers were equal victims of Bolshevism. Another important distinction between the SR and the Menshevik positions involved their evaluations of the Soviet Union’s location along the eschatological trajectory. For the Mensheviks, the Bolshevik regime was a deformed revolutionary regime, an eschatological detour; for the SRs it was a counterrevolution, an eschatological setback. This is the reason the Socialist Revolutionaries were inclined to topple the Bolshevik regime by force, whereas the Mensheviks were determined to await the maturation of the Soviet working class before militating to see the Revolution put back on track again. The SR description of the activities of November  as a coup perfectly exemplifies a penchant for voluntarist rhetoric that often contradicted an acknowledgment of the merits of deterministic social explanations. Whereas the Menshevik reliance on the “objective progression of the class struggle” ruled out the possibility of immediate action, the SR contention that the revolutionary situation in Russia persisted—and that the Bolshevik 

                      

counterrevolution was a lull before the real Revolution that was just around the corner—led them to conclude that the revolutionary subject was still free to assert itself. ⁶¹ The Ultra-Left: Anarchists

Not all oppositionist activities in the universities of the s were carried out in the name of one of the large revolutionary parties. A legion of smaller extremist organizations vied for student attention, organizing a rally here, publishing a leaflet there. Each such group claimed to have its own ideology, its own particular interpretation of the Revolution, and its own troubles. And they differed from each other in their understanding of the situation in the Soviet universities. Russian Anarchists boasted a long tradition of revolutionary extremism. In their own eyes they were the only ones who had remained loyal to the world-transforming values of the revolutionary movement. We (the Anarchists kept reiterating) remain loyal to the toilers, attacking the Soviet regime from the left and not from the right, whereas other oppositionist parties collaborate with the Bolshevik counterrevolution. More than any other ideological camp, however, the Anarchists were divided among themselves. Anarcho-Syndicalists, the strongest Anarchist faction in Russia, wished to build a new society on the basis of production cooperatives. Championing what they called “economic dictatorship,” they favored trade unions as the vehicle of the proletariat’s economic struggle. In Anarcho-Syndicalist thought, emphasis lay less on personal freedom and more on egalitarian economic organization rising from the grass roots. Taking issue with what they considered the neglect of the individual, AnarchoCommunists hoped to integrate the individual with the mass. Setting themselves against the Anarcho-Syndicalists who delegated too much authority to the inarticulate producers, Anarcho-Communists accepted the Social Democratic view that the masses have not yet attained the necessary revolutionary consciousness and that they need to be pushed forward by an “AnarchistCommunist vanguard.” From this it followed that, for the time being, Anarchists had to field not only economic but also political organizations in order to conduct an effective struggle against Bolshevism. Opposing AnarchoSyndicalism as well as Anarcho-Communism, Anarcho-Individualism considered itself the sole defender of the main tenet of Anarchism—personal 

Proletarianization Contested

liberation. Years of struggle convinced workers, peasants, and even the intelligentsia that the old dreams of state-supported socialism not only did not emancipate humanity but enslaved personality even more, the AnarchoIndividualism representatives argued. They believed that the society Bolsheviks created is sharply divided between leaders and followers. The AnarchoIndividualist slogan was “Maximum freedom to the individual, minimum freedom to society over the individual.”⁶² The Anarchists fielded a sizable student army in the early s. There was a student section in the Anarchists Youth Organization. A group known as the United Anarchist Students Association had a short existence before its leaders were deported or imprisoned. There were apparently more than a few Anarchist supporters of the Union of Communist Youth. The Bolshevik Central Committee repeatedly warned that the young were “fertile soil for Anarcho-Syndicalist propaganda.” Still, neither academic autonomy nor the well-being of students as such was ever a major concern for the Anarchists, who believed that the liberation of the university could be achieved only in the context of the general victory of the exploited.⁶³ Anarchist publications overflowed with the usual lamentations regarding the plight of the working class: “Communists rule over the proletariat despotically”; “Never has the Russian proletariat been so atomized and demoralized, so politically and economically enslaved”; “Acting in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat the Bolsheviks installed a dictatorship over the proletariat.”⁶⁴ The victory won by the proletariat in  had been torn from their hands: “Comrade workers! Do you run production? Do you inspect the work of your managers?” Far from living up to their role as agents of universalism the Bolshevik cells, according to the Anarchists, “were a particularist arena” (poprishche lichnykh schetov). An Anarchist who visited the Soviet Union in  commented summarily: “A counterrevolutionary stench was assailing my nostrils from every direction.”⁶⁵ It was not always easy for students to distinguish between Bolshevik and Anarchist political vocabularies. Both sides advanced similar catchwords in a competition for the mantle of Most Radical Left. We alone, claimed the Anarchists, remain loyal to the “proletariat”: “Taking care of the ‘proletariat,’ pompously calling themselves the ‘worker-peasant power,’ the Bolsheviks are actually busy exploiting workers and peasants.” Anarcho-Individualists argued that “ ‘Communism’ is a regime of military drill . . . that leads to degeneracy.” Anarcho-Communists felt obliged to appropriate Communism 

                      

to themselves and to challenge the Bolsheviks: “If you want to call yourselves ‘Communists,’ stop repressing us Anarcho-Communists!”⁶⁶ “Soviets”—another crucial source of Bolshevik legitimacy—was a similarly contested term. Some Anarchists rejected the soviets, claiming that “soviets” free of the vices of government were an absurdity. Other Anarchists affirmed the “soviets” in principle—with the important qualification that, “to be true agents of the proletarian will, the soviets must include no representatives of political parties.” The pro-soviet Anarchists were proud they had inspired the demand of the Kronstadt rebels for “soviets with a small ‘s’ ”—that is, soviets without Bolsheviks.⁶⁷ The Anarchists righteously declared that in the Bolshevik state the intelligentsia was the ruling class. “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a safe haven for the bourgeois intelligentsia,” exclaimed the Anarchist press. “We have to unmask the class nature of Communist power—it is a despotism of the intelligentsia”; “If the proletariat is really in power, whom does it turn its power against? What we really have is a dictatorship of ‘learned specialists’ who scorn the workers.” Equating the intelligentsia with the bourgeoisie, one Anarchist commanded, “Sir, hands off the proletariat.”⁶⁸ When Stalin accused Soviet engineers of wrecking the mines at the behest of the international bourgeoisie and staged the Shakhty trial in , the Anarchist press joined in the assault on the intelligentsia. An Anarchist appeal sang out: “Comrades! Miners of Donbass! What has changed in your mines now that the Shakhty trial is over? Have enough of these parasites been shot? What measures have been taken to prevent similar sabotage in the future?” The Anarchists urged the workers to organize, independent of the state, and to defend themselves against the dictatorship of the Bolshevik experts. The intelligentsia, they noted, was vulnerable enough: “Having removed their thin, revolutionary veneer, workers will replace the bossy Bolshevik intelligentsia with true socialists.” “Workers! Remember October! . . . Move against our common class enemies, the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie!”⁶⁹ Seen from this perspective, the universities were guilty of preparing experts and propagating the hated intelligentsia. In the Anarchist view, everything about Soviet education was dishonest: “Professors pile one Marxist formula on top of another . . . hoping to keep their university chairs; proletariat youth streams into the Komsomol only to get educational privileges and so on.” Consider the following account by a prominent Anarchist, Anatolii Gorelik, of how the new, Bolshevized student intelligentsia helped to sup

Proletarianization Contested

press a heroic workers’ anti-Soviet strike movement: “When a strike erupted in Moscow in , . . . and the position of the Bolsheviks was imperiled, a few hundred students, primarily from Sverdlov University, dressed up in worker clothes and infiltrated worker rallies.” The hall where Kalinin was making a speech in defense of the regime’s labor policy “was crowded with disguised Communist students. The mass of agitating workers was kept outside . . . and eventually was shot at. Indeed, Communist detachments, Red Army soldiers and students have all joined in this sort of work.”⁷⁰ For the Anarchists, proletarianization was hardly an acceptable remedy to the situation in the universities. When they entered intellectual institutions, manual laborers were exposed to degenerative forces: “Workers,” the Anarchists exclaimed, “realize that even true ‘workers’ representatives,’ if put into a position that objectively contradicts the position of the producers, metamorphose into ordinary exploiters.” Besides, top-down activities, the sort favored by Narkompros, or any state measures for that matter, were anathema: “What makes Anarchism unique, what separates Anarchism from other ‘isms’ Bolshevism included, is that Anarchism does not stifle the initiative of the masses”; “Evil resides not in any particular form of government but in the principle of government itself. We Anarchists want to teach the people to get by without government.” Deep resentment toward the state explains the Anarchists’ singular emphasis on “freedom” (svoboda) and “independent activity” (samodeiatel’nost’). Anarchists defined themselves as “freedom-fanatics” (svobodniki) who allowed each person “to seek salvation in whatever way one chooses.” According to this analysis, “the socialist goal is equality, while the Anarchist goal is freedom. Socialists believe that, when men are liberated, freedom emancipates human personality. Anarchists believe that only men who are already free can create an equal society.” It was the political rather than the social emphasis of the term “freedom” that gave it such prominence in the Anarchist framework, and freedom was to be won through all-out opposition to each and every state institution: “Freedom is incompatible with violence and since the state represents violence this means that freedom is incompatible with the state”; “Anarchism preaches freedom for everybody and predicts the demise of all states—even the socialist ones—that want to reclaim our freedoms.”⁷¹ Antistatism was the leitmotif of a number of Anarchist leaflets circulated among students in the early s. Issued by Petrograd Anarcho-Communists on May Day , one such leaflet bore in the top right corner of the sheet 

                      

not the standard Social Democratic “Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!” but the Anarchistic “State—A Gang of Thieves at Work!” The leaflet’s headline laid out the Anarchist vision: “No God, no power, no private property, no majority rule!” The text castigated GPU repression in the universities: The hungry Bolshevik clique . . . is a gang of exploiters who take after the tsars. Zinoviev and company enjoy all life can offer, while you proletarians are forced to live in misery. . . . The Bolshevik celebration is one of parasites who have filled their stomachs, a celebration of vampires who drink our blood.⁷²

The downtrodden were a major subject in Anarchist rhetoric. But whereas the leaflet cited above was indeed full of expressions of concern for the lower classes, the poor, contrary to what we have seen in socialist usage, were not identified as “democracy.” This must have been because the term was too strongly associated in the Anarchist mind with Social Democracy and its statism. One pundit went so far as to oppose “democracy” and “freedom”: “A socialist power, even if it is the power of workers—a democracy—will not satisfy the exploited, because power subjugates, no matter who wields it.” But even if the Anarchists did not speak of “student democracy,” and even if they objected to Narkompros statist proletarianization, “equality” (ravenstvo) in educational opportunities remained dear to the Anarchist heart: “There is no freedom without equality! . . . ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’!” The demand for “free access to universal education” was an important aspect of the  Anarchist program. “Education,” stated an Anarchist manifesto published two years later, “should not belong to only the handful of the lucky ones, even if they are called the rulers, but to the people.” Every student had to be “free to learn what he wanted. If under the old order official education taught respect for the monarch and . . . if under the Bolsheviks education means respect for the Bolsheviks, their commissars and their Marxism,” then Anarchist education would remain under the control of the commune, avoiding any traces of authoritarianism.⁷³ No important eschatological notion was missing from the vision the Anarchists set before their student supporters: class struggle remained the “driving force of History”; “progress” was all-important; the future still “belonged to the proletariat”; and “History” was “on our side.”⁷⁴ There was even the belief in an apocalyptic upheaval that would make the last first. For the moment, the voice of the Anarchist messiah was “weak and lost in the



Proletarianization Contested

cacophony of other insolent voices,” but vindication would not be long in coming: “The soil is ripe for the great event—the true [podlinnaiia] social revolution, stateless and egalitarian.”⁷⁵ Of course nothing could be done without proper enlightenment: only once the Anarchist gospel was disseminated among the masses and the Anarchist movement “became a tool of conscious intervention in the course of History,” was the Revolution “historically irrefutable.”⁷⁶ We even find something like the Bolshevik reckoning of time in the Anarchist writings from the post- period. On one hand, the Anarchists argued, no historical event was premature: “The very fact that the masses had brought about a social revolution in Russia shows that they must be prepared to accept a superior form of social organization.”⁷⁷ On the other hand, Russia was “obviously not yet ready for anarchy.” This led some pundits to endorse the idea of a transitional period, an Anarchist NEP as it were. “Recent years have shown that the Revolution can begin before even a significant minority of toilers is imbued with anarchist ideas. Our transitional period is to be the period that separates the beginning of the Revolution from the creation of the anarchist commune.”⁷⁸ Just as during NEP the Bolsheviks cooperated with the bourgeois professoriate, Anarcho-Syndicalists reckoned that a degree of participation with those defending the economic interests of workers in the universities was expedient for now.⁷⁹ In the Anarchist scenario, true Revolution involved not the economic transformation conceived by Marxist pseudorevolutionaries but the birth of a radically new spirit. The pundit Solonovich contrasted the Anarchist notion of a “revolution in ethics, the technique of internal individualization” with the Bolshevik notion of a “revolution in law, the technique of external individualization”: A typical intelligentsia aberration, Bolshevism enslaves people, forcing them into external discipline. . . . Intelligentsia sectarians are building the temple of the goddess Utility. . . . But Anarchists know that a revolution in form is only a change in decoration. Such a revolution has arrived, it is true, but what we really need is a psycho-physiological, spiritual revolution. While the socialist movement may well have resulted from mechanical motion, only Anarchism can generate motion out of consciousness alone. . . . The cosmic path to the emancipation of world and man starts with the will looking into the mirror of the human mind and begetting entities such as the



                       Notion and the Person. Through the mediation of men, self-consciousness and universal freedom are born.⁸⁰

The Gnostic features of an eschatological discourse are clearly in place here: spiritualism, detachment from worldly values, and the assumption that only the human soul’s discovery of outer-worldly messianic potential would permit a reversal of the course of History and the achievement of true freedom. The Anarchists attributed to the Marxists a one-dimensional message, accused them of being incapable of halting the “history of the exploitation of men by men,” and claimed that they alone were the bearers of a liberating spirit. This motif of Gnostic prophecy was articulated even more clearly by an anonymous Anarchist: “We believe that our chaotic world preserves something of an otherworldly, divine, never fading light. Anarchist knowledge, Plato would have said, is the recollection of something we once saw in the divine order. While most Anarchists do not consider themselves Christians, the Anarchist ideal is a variation on the ‘light of Christ.’” According to this author, the Anarchist teachings were nothing but the flickering of the cosmic truth in the human heart: “Anarchists know that spiritual emancipation is a question of self-emancipation. True freedom cannot be bestowed but must be born out of internal necessity. Only the one who emancipates himself from all evil and all chaos is truly free. This is the only way to emancipate men and humanity.”⁸¹ In the Anarchists’ estimation, Revolution erupted in “backward” Russia before it did in the more “advanced” Germany because the Russian proletariat, uncorrupted by the placid intellectualism of the West, “preserved its creativity and rebelliousness.” This was the nihilist moment in Anarchism— consciousness could be withheld as long as the Revolution lingered in its blind, destructive stage. But the revolutionary class could not be left utterly bereft of guidance; it must be shown the way to the light. Loyal to the eschatological contrast between light and darkness, Anarchist discourse distinguished between “unconscious workers” (workers who believed that “the bourgeois government had to be replaced by some sort of socialist government”) and “conscious workers” (workers who understood that “any state is detrimental to the development of humanity”).⁸² It was because the “slave psychology” of the masses was very much intact, with many workers still “religious” and “benighted,” that the Bolsheviks had been successful in brainwashing the proletariat into believing that “Anarchism equalled the Antichrist.”⁸³ 

Proletarianization Contested

The trouble with the proletariat, in the Anarchist analysis, is that “it is moving toward its goal by trial and error—instinctively, not consciously. The Anarchists, by contrast, have an ideal. Based on a long-standing theory, this ideal permits the articulation of the shape of things to come.” Bolsheviks could be beaten “only with ideas and broad propaganda.” The crucial battle, an Anarchist hymn suggested, was the battle over the consciousness of the masses: The one who does not know and does not know he does not know—is a fool. Avoid him! The one who does not know and knows he does not know—is a simpleton. Teach him! The one who knows and does not know he knows—is a sleeper. Awaken him! The one who knows and knows he knows—is a seer. Join him!

With supreme confidence, the Anarchists declared that they alone carried the torch. One of their hymns went as follows: The enemy is strong, Yes! But the victory will not be his! We carry the light, he sows darkness, The enemy will not leave a trace.⁸⁴

During the early years after the Revolution it appeared to the Anarchists that universal enlightenment was near. “Life was boiling. Impelled toward general education we, the Anarchists, rushed to the libraries and schools, eager to learn . . . so that we would be in a position to help in what we thought was the construction, in Russia, of the first free society.” The “awakening toilers” in this narrative were craving Anarchist knowledge: “The universities are thirsty for our speakers,” stated one reporter.⁸⁵ “Kropotkin’s funeral,” added another, “shook up the masses. The auditoriums at which I lectured were full . . . and Anarchist cells were formed in all the universities.”⁸⁶ For a moment it seemed as if the masses might be sufficiently conscious for self-rule. “Now that the intellectual proletariat [intellektual’nyi proletariat] has emerged . . . even workers who were until recently manual laborers, and thus slaves, are learning to organize into unions and groups where everyone 

                      

is, in a sense, a ‘ruler’ [upravliaiushchii].” The public was obliged to recognize the existence of a “significant social group that was able to organize its own affairs. The members of this group were sufficiently conscious to proceed without guidance. Intellectually very developed, and possessed of an internal sense of order, they needed no state above them.”⁸⁷ But then the socialist parties intervened and everything was destroyed. “Social-Democracy, passing itself off as ‘politically mature,’ killed all initiative and turned the masses into a herd that is obedient to the call of its shepherd —the Party.” The  student purge was presented by the Anarchists as a final blow against free revolutionary thought: During the last months massive repressions have been initiated against students who do not belong to the parties. In a few days, Petrograd’s jails were filled with youth. Thousands have been expelled from institutions of higher education and have lost everything. In one of the illegal student proclamations we read the following: “We live in a country where a handful of oligarchs dictate to a mass of defenseless slaves. The minds of the masses are befogged and they have become a hand-raising machine. The suffering and the destruction of so many student lives should be blamed on the senseless and unchecked Bolshevik dictatorship that tramples upon and ruins everything around it.” Authorities are not satisfied with just “purging” students. No fewer than sixty-five students from Petrograd were sent to Solovki Island. Students from Moscow marched to jail singing revolutionary songs and yelling: “Down with Bolshevik oppression.” It has been a while since the capital witnessed such a revolutionary boost.⁸⁸

Identifying a basic split in the student body between Communist students (the “oppressors”) and the proletarian student intelligentsia (the “oppressed”), a contemporary Anarchist leaflet urged the latter to “stop indulging in empty talk, go to the people” and start spreading “Anarchist consciousness.”⁸⁹ It is evident that Anarchist objections to state interventionism did not translate into the rejection of all tutelage of the class-messiah. If anything, Anarchists criticized Bolshevik proletarianization not for its intrusiveness but for its external character, its inability to reach the student soul. Following the Marxist usage, Anarchists distinguished between salvational consciousness —that spirit of freedom hiding in the bosom of men—and bourgeois knowhow. Vying for the mantle of Gnostic herald, they put themselves in the role of the messianic intelligentsia: “A good Anarchist is a politically educated



Proletarianization Contested

man, able to snatch true consciousness from the bourgeois government with his bare hands.” When a leaflet drawn up by Anarchist students stated that “the Bolsheviks have been cheating us for six years but they can no longer hide their vile mug from the penetrating gaze of the proletariat,” the “us” signified the unity of proletariat and its Anarchist representative.⁹⁰ Elevating the individual self to the position of the highest value, the Union of Anarchist Youths paradoxically volunteered to teach what “self-education” was all about: “The organization of youth that thinks along Anarchist lines has to lay the ground for both a broad Anarchist movement in the country and for the self-education of its members. We have to conduct Anarchist work among the young and the toilers.” Consider how, amid biting criticisms of Narkompros tutelage in the area of education, the contours of a no less proselytizing Anarchist intelligentsia emerged: The Communist regime will not relinquish educational privileges without a struggle. We have to show the youth that a government that seeks its own interest and not theirs is hiding behind the fig leaf of revolutionary phraseology. . . . Despite the holy chatter of the Narkompros chief—Lunacharskii is a busy man who switches between drama-reviews and government decrees on education and Communist universities—. . . it suddenly turns out that the country can afford the luxury of cutbacks in higher education. . . . For political police there is enough money, for education of toilers there is not. Truly, the darkness of the rulers at the top has combined with the rule of darkness at the bottom. . . . Since we are aware that a genuine revolution of toilers depends on culture, we, mental laborers, have to do our utmost to enhance our own spiritual level and the spiritual level of our brother workers. We must both avoid the evolutionist-Menshevik kulturtraggerism and win our release from the hollow revolutionist (but in essence philistine and reactionary) phraseology of world-destroyers and world-negators. . . . It is imperative that we combat political illiteracy and fight for a true school of toilers.

A good part of the intelligentsia ethos was thus rehabilitated. The Anarchist manifesto’s contention that “one million sparks fly from the AnarchoCommunist, world-enlightening fire” was a striking echo of Lenin’s depiction of the light the Party intelligentsia was bringing to humanity.⁹¹ It was now claimed that the weakness of the Anarchist movement lay not in the innumerable intelligentsia interlopers but in the dearth of good intelligentsia cadres.



                       The intelligentsia very rarely embraces Anarchism. Russian Anarchism has been marked by the absence of an educated and revolutionary Anarchist intelligentsia. This is why, despite the presence of many who were inclined toward anarchy . . . we did not move beyond occasional Anarchist outbursts that were often transformed, thanks to the cultural backwardness of those Anarchists who were speaking up, into the exact opposite of what they were supposed to be.

The merit of the intelligentsia lay in its “intellectual development. The intelligentsia is able to examine the proletarian movement in a scientific way, demonstrate its historical logic and give a final shape to the ideas that were born in the workers’ minds. . . . A guiding star, the intelligentsia helps workers clarify for themselves their actual condition in the present and their purpose in the future.” Of course, it remained true, in the Anarchist view, that the entire intelligentsia could not be universalist. “But that intelligentsia which does not share its insights with the workers does not deserve the title it carries. The intelligentsia that gloats over its superior knowledge, that boasts, that rebels against capitalism not for the sake of general ideals of equality and fraternity but in order to become the new ruler—that intelligentsia is a philistine foe of the working class.”⁹² Those who sweepingly equated the intelligentsia with the bourgeoisie were taken to task in the pages of the official Anarchist press (though the editorial board noted its “reservations on the subject of the article”): The intelligentsia can include the poor and the wealthy, a manual laborer and a teacher who engages in mental labor. The intelligentsia is not an objectively given class or estate but a subjective entity. Just as some workers or peasants can be philistines so others can be members of the intelligentsia. . . . Take the history of the Russian revolutionaries: regardless of their social origins they were all members of the intelligentsia. It is wrong generally to castigate the Russian intelligentsia which bore up the people and spilled its blood.

The goal of the Revolution, according to this unsigned contribution, “is not to fill everyone’s stomach but to allow everyone to lift himself up, to find his way in science and arts, to develop intellectually.”⁹³ Anarchists now noted that among the “casualties of Communism” were, alongside “millions of workers and peasants,” the “toiling intelligentsia.” The addition of the intelligentsia to the list of victims signified a crucial expansion 

Proletarianization Contested

of the messianic subject.⁹⁴ “Permitting free trade but not free life,” NEP, in its Anarchist reading, had created profound differences between universalist intelligentsia, which recently became an integral part of the proletariat, and particularist intelligentsia, which joined the oppressors.⁹⁵ What before was the alpha and omega of the Anarchist social thinking—the class division of society into manual and mental laborers—was now an anachronism: Revolutionary syndicalism was begotten as an anti-intelligentsia movement which fought to liberate the working class from the oppression of the ideologists. . . . Under the present division of labor, however, this point of view is no longer tenable. No worker can create unless a thinker has first conceived the goal of creation. . . . Today’s society has to be divided into the haves and the have-nots, the latter category including mental laborers who cannot satisfy their basic needs.⁹⁶

Traditional class lines were redrawn and the customary opposition of mental and manual labor revised: “The rundown [obezdolennaia] intelligentsia, just like the bottom layer of the working class, earns a meager salary inferior to that of the skilled worker. Today poor workers, poor intelligentsia and poor peasants—the cadres of the Anarchist army—make up a single class. Only the victory of the poor proletariat will usher in Anarchist Communism.” Class struggle, in this analysis, was driven by the poor and not by the so-called toiling people, or the “industrial proletariat” in general. “Between the have-nots who support us and the haves who support the bourgeoisie, other intermediate classes exist and support conciliatory ideologies.”⁹⁷ The final remark was an obvious jab at the socialist parties held in high contempt by the Anarchists: “Mensheviks are a bourgeois party. We have no reason to assume that upon gaining power they will not become despots who trample the honor of workers and peasants.” The SRs did not fare any better: “Economically, the Socialist Revolutionaries are drawn toward that part of the intelligentsia that exploits the proletariat; politically, they are attracted by the idea of a constitutional assembly which will only befuddle the masses.”⁹⁸ Despite this rhetoric of self-segregation, the Anarchist approach to the construction of the new intelligentsia essentially paralleled the approach of its socialist antagonists. The Anarchists never abandoned the prism of class analysis. They agreed that NEP economics and GPU politics dealt a heavy blow to the university and sought, just like their rivals, to convert the new



                      

intelligentsia to their own creed. What made the Anarchist position somewhat distinctive was not the rejection of a salvational goal but the rejection of the role of the party in achieving that goal. All political movements, in the words of the Anarchist Borgman, worked to lure the masses into their party organizations, and theirs only, as if they were “the only salvational church. . . . But in reality, political parties care only about their own interests . . . introducing seeds of destruction into the revolutionary movement.”⁹⁹ Even this stance was not easy to maintain, however. In their more candid moments, the Anarchist pundits admitted to a dilemma: If we avoid grasping power, the fruits of victory are taken away from us; but if we both destroy and create, if we help the so-called toilers’ parties to defeat Bolshevism, then one form of repression is bound to be replaced by another. In the late s Anarcho-Syndicalists started arguing that the “Bolsheviks have been able to reign for a decade not because their regime is stable but because there is no Anarchist party to enlighten the masses.” For quite some time the motto of the Anarcho-Universalists had been “We’ve had enough of careless and criminal irresponsibility! We admit the necessity of creating a united organization that will be welded together by revolutionary discipline.” Even the Anarcho-Communist press admitted what amounted to heresy: “The only revolutionary power that can unite the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat and the poor peasantry is an Anarcho-Communist party.”¹⁰⁰ The Ultra-Left: Workers’ Truth

Workers’ Truth was another body that took up cudgels in the debates over the universities. An ultra-leftist Communist splinter group, Workers’ Truth had its precursors within the syndicalist wing of the Bolshevik camp, known for its biting criticism of the new intelligentsia.¹⁰¹ The  Manifesto of the Party members affiliated with the Proletcult movement (and apparently also with the Workers’ Opposition), entitled “We-Collectivists!” is usually regarded as the inspiration behind the platform of the Workers’ Truth. The manifesto claimed that NEP marked the formation of a class-coalition in which the laboring classes acceded some power to the “bureaucratic intelligentsia.” The authors of the document expressed their fear that with time, the mushrooming Soviet intelligentsia would transform itself into an independent class and preside over the implementation of State Capitalism in Russia.¹⁰² 

Proletarianization Contested

Despite the fact that Workers’ Truth inherited in the early s much of the proletarian lore of the Collectivists and the disbanded Proletcult it seems to have been largely a student organization. The majority of Workers’ Truth sympathizers arrested in  by GPU, for example, were affiliated with Moscow universities and institutes. But the faction’s social composition did not impede Workers’ Truth from criticizing what it called “the student bourgeoisie” or from assuming the task of representing the betrayed authentic proletariat. Without officially breaking away from the Party, Workers’ Truth blamed Narkompros for allowing the universities to degenerate. Its uncompromising radicalism and extreme interpretation of proletarianization were reminiscent of the Left Bolshevik Opposition, which Bogdanov had led before the revolution and during the short-lived existence of Proletcult.¹⁰³ During the  purge Worker’s Truth circulated an “Appeal to the Revolutionary Proletariat of Russia.” Addressed to “all the revolutionary elements who remain loyal to the working class,” the leaflet declared that the Communist Party had degenerated into a “technocratic intelligentsia” (organizatorskaia intelligentsiia) and had become the new ruling class: The Communist party, which during the Revolution was the party of the working class, has transformed itself into the ruling party. Now it is the party of organizers and of state managers. . . . By assuming control of the production process, the technocratic intelligentsia entrenched itself in power positions. To judge by its methods of operation and its ideology this intelligentsia is a sort of inside-out bourgeoisie, capable of constructing only a capitalist economy. In the face of the technocratic intelligentsia, a new bourgeoisie is emerging, a bourgeoisie which amalgamates the business elements of the old ruling class and of the new technocrats. Having regrouped, the new capitalists opened their crusade against the working class.

A classic piece of Marxist analysis follows. The leaflet describes the reassertion of class disparities and explains, in class terms, why the Soviet Union would inevitably degenerate. “The soviet, Party and professional bureaucracies and the organizers of state capitalism live in conditions starkly different from those of the working class. Their material welfare and the stability of their position depend on the rate of exploitation of the toiling masses. Thus, conflicts of interests arise between the Party and the working class.” Next, the reader is reminded that being determines consciousness: “The social practice 

                      

of the Communist Party necessarily sets its way of thinking, its social interests and ideals, in flat contradiction to the interests of the struggling proletariat.” A diagnosis of the Party’s class character concludes the analysis: “The Bolsheviks became the party of the technocratic intelligentsia. . . . The backwardness of the working class meant that it lost its ties with the Party.”¹⁰⁴ Workers’ Truth constantly reiterated that the power and wealth acquired by the Communist elites had put a wedge between them and the workers. In an appeal to the Twelfth Party Congress the faction criticized the Bolsheviks for handing state power to the bourgeoisie: The alleged class-dictator is in reality deprived of the most elemental political rights. Workers, pending unemployment and repression, cannot freely exercise their vote. Workers’ organizations are permeated with a police spirit that exterminates all things alive and revolutionary. At the same time the bourgeoisie has won the de facto right of coalition and access to the press. In the person of its bourgeois intelligentsia, it enjoys electoral rights.¹⁰⁵

Since the party of the workers had degenerated into a bourgeois party, the proletariat’s political monopoly was allegedly snatched from its hands by the resurging bourgeoisie. Workers’ Truth charged the Bolshevik vanguard with failing to defend the working class. In the words of a Workers’ Truth leaflet: “In the Russian republic, where even oppositionist bourgeois groups enjoy a factual, and oftentimes even juridical freedom, the proletariat has to fight for each bit of freedom.” But the remedy proposed by Workers’ Truth related to workers’ self-organization and to the elimination of all other agencies that made (false) claims to representing the working class; there was no talk of instituting a formal, universal democracy. In keeping with such antiliberal sentiments, Workers’ Truth defined “democracy” as a “set of conditions securing minimal opportunities for the struggle of the working class in the realm of politics, economics and culture.” The problem of the Soviet constitution, in this interpretation, lay not in the stated goal of establishing a workers’ dictatorship over other classes but in the actual usurpation of the workers’ legitimate right to dictatorship by a nascent NEP intelligentsia. Workers’ Truth asked: “Is it not time to give the working class the elemental right of self-organization and class struggle?” Degeneration within the Party and the absence of political leadership for the working class affected society in general:



Proletarianization Contested The renaissance of regular capitalist relations . . . facilitated the domination of capital and the reinvigoration of the state apparatus headed by the technocratic intelligentsia. The NEP attack against industry and the consequent scattering of the working class has annihilated, for the time being, the working class as a political force. Deprived of a revolutionary organization of its own, the working class is held in captivity by the bourgeoisie.¹⁰⁶

The stand of Workers’ Truth on university proletarianization and the making of the new intelligentsia had been predetermined by its general evaluation of the condition of the class struggle in the Soviet Union. The spokesman for the faction observed: “Communism, allegedly a proletarian creed, but in fact a bourgeois ideology, the ideology of technocratic intelligentsia, fascinated . . . students passing through the workers’ faculties and other educational institutions.” Narkompros admissions policies were perceived by Workers’ Truth as one of the methods employed by a degenerate regime to create a new ruling class. Soviet education, its leaflet maintained, separated workers from their class, turned them into an elitist intelligentsia, and put them in a position of control over the labor process. To combat these effects, Workers’ Truth called for a “merciless struggle . . . against the philistine and authoritarian tendencies within the working class” and for the development of “cultural work among workers who remained in industry.” No less important was a “struggle against allocating funds to the universities, which were, after all, filled with declassed workers.”¹⁰⁷ The Workers’ Truth leaflet was eager to spell out its disagreements with rival parties and rival streams of revolutionary thought. The Mensheviks “had become a purely intelligentsia organization, alienated from Russian reality.” The SRs had “lost their social base —the rich peasantry which now supports the Bolsheviks”—and so had become an anachronism; and Workers’ Opposition, though “staffed with a substantial number of workers, strives to reinstate the outdated banners and methods of War Communism.”¹⁰⁸ There is certainly some rhetorical heart here, but the underlying principles on which the Workers’ Truth analysis rested substantially reduced its claims to ideological singularity. For example, the Workers’ Truth supposition that workers, if sent to study, tended to disassociate themselves from their mother class was consonant with the Menshevik and the SR view that Soviet proletarianization had failed because workers, drawn into the university Party cells, became obsequious GPU henchmen. Nor were the Workers’



                      

Truth warnings against degeneration original. Convinced that workers needed a conscious vanguard to guide them for the duration of the transitional period, the Bolsheviks themselves feared that this vanguard risked degenerating because its studies separated it from the factory. Bolshevik alarmists themselves constantly repeated that, if the government was not careful, “the consciousness of the Party intelligentsia could . . . easily be reduced to a typical intelligentsia consciousness.” And Workers’ Opposition (a major faction that appealed to the Lenin-led Central Committee majority at the Tenth Party Congress) argued that this calamity had already befallen the Party, in fact as early as .¹⁰⁹ Appearances notwithstanding, the Workers’ Truth anti-intelligentsia thrust was not very different from the Menshevik or the SR worship of the revolutionary intelligentsia. Workers’ Truth did not levy accusations against the revolutionary intelligentsia in general, only against the technocratic intelligentsia produced by the Soviet universities. Inversely, the Mensheviks and the SRs agreed with the Workers’ Truth characterization of the new intelligentsia as a class that betrayed the proletariat. This is not to say there was nothing distinctive in the positions taken by Workers’ Truth. Concerns that a cleavage between the working class and its intellectual vanguard might become unbridgeable led Workers’ Truth, in a typically syndicalist manner, to posit that a workers’ intelligentsia could emanate only from the factories. Successful proletarian revolution depended not on access to education but on the cultivation of authentic, proletarian knowledge. Furthermore, Workers’ Truth organized its analysis of the class struggle not around issues of ownership and property distribution but around issues of control over the intellectual product. Influenced by the writings of Makhaev and Bogdanov, Workers’ Truth argued that the abortion of the  revolution was because of its failure to expropriate bourgeois knowledge along with bourgeois property. This momentous Bolshevik oversight allegedly allowed the bourgeoisie to resurface in a new guise. More vociferous than the rival camps, Workers’ Truth described the “new intelligentsia” as an exploiter, propelled by a doctrine postulating that knowledge, rather than wealth, was the source of inequality in Soviet society. The breeding ground of the new intelligentsia—the Soviet university—would have to be razed.¹¹⁰



Proletarianization Contested

The Kadets

During the revolutionary year and immediately afterward, the Kadets fared best in student circles. Kadet cells operated in universities in Petrograd, Moscow, Saratov, and Kazan and party membership was high. At one point during the Civil War the Kadets tried to consolidate their position by calling for a national student congress—a bold step that precipitated immediate Soviet reprisals. Cheka arrests during the Civil War and Narkompros administrative pressure in the early s depleted Kadet cells and terminated their independent activity. Even so, the leader of the party, Pavel Miliukov, knowing full well where the strength of his party lay, in  advised underground Kadet party activists from abroad that “without the universities our game is worth nothing. Try to base yourself on the student mass as best you can.”¹¹¹ The Kadets derived little satisfaction from Narkompros policies. The charges published in the Kadet émigré press repeated, both in content and in tone, many of the themes we have already encountered in the Menshevik and SR appraisals of Soviet universities: “Individuals with no Bolshevik affiliation are little heeded—Communists do not want to spend money educating anyone who does not support their politics”; “All workers’ faculty students want is an edge in life”; “The Communist students are gendarmes who participate in dispersing independent student gatherings and assist in student arrests”; “University purges are designed to remove the politically independent element of the student body,” and so on.¹¹² Although echoing familiar themes, the Kadet line of criticism was unique in taking Narkompros class bias as such to task. If the socialists identified certain classes as messianic subjects because they believed that these classes had the potential to transcend their particularity and represent all of humanity, the Kadets maintained that at present all classes, not only the “proletariat” or the “toilers,” were equally lacking in ethical sentiment but that all had equal potential to become “free” and “universalist” subjects in the future. It followed that the members of every class deserved the education that would open their eyes. In the Kadet view, higher education under the tsars was superior to its Soviet successor, because it had been less exclusionist: “The old university was an all-estate [vsesoslovnoe] and all-class [vseklassovoe] institution. The universities were open to everyone! The contemporary university, by contrast, is closed to the intelligentsia. The rabble of the street has stormed the shrine of science and from there dictates its own laws.” Narkompros



                      

policies brought nothing but gloom and doom: “Only time will tell how serious has been the damage to knowledge our nation gathered over centuries. We are sadly aware of harsh treatment of higher education and the intelligentsia.”¹¹³ Editorials in the Kadet émigré newspapers reproached the universities for class discrimination: “The application of Soviet principles to academic admissions instituted an upside-down nobility,” stated a Kadet newspaper in . “The greatest advantages are assigned to the Party and Komsomol members —the hereditary nobility, so to speak. Next come individuals of proletarian origins, or what they call ‘worker and peasant members of the productivist trade unions.’ Intelligentsia and bourgeoisie bring up the rear. . . .” A year later, the same tone was kept: “Only workers’ faculty graduates and members of the ruling party dare to knock at the door of Soviet higher education. Other groups not only do not believe that they will be permitted to enroll, but deem it dangerous to so much as apply.”¹¹⁴ As the Kadets saw it, the distortions in Narkompros admissions were “not an accidental upshot of the system but its foundation stone. Communists secure privileges for themselves by exploiting the demagogic premises of the language of class. Universal [obshchechelovecheskie] cultural values, such as the general right to education, are trampled down in the name of class.” Narkompros had re-created “a full-blown table of ranks. No Russian government has ever gone so far to betray the mission of higher education! Is it conceivable that the tsarist government would have published a decree restricting higher education to the members of the Union of Russian People?”¹¹⁵ Bolshevik-style affirmative action drew such venomous attacks as a direct result of Kadet ideology. The Kadets pointed with real pride to inclusivism as the trait that set them apart from the socialist parties. The Party of People’s Freedom (the Kadet platform stated) “is distinguished from all other parties in that it advances the interests of all citizens, and not of one particular social class. . . . Our party struggles not only for workers and peasants, but for the welfare and prosperity of all classes. . . . It has a non-class [vneklassovyi] character, neither bourgeois nor proletarian but all national [vsenarodnyi].”¹¹⁶ Proud to be a “class party,” the socialists (the reader will recall) tended to condemn the Bolshevik regime for its “classless nature.” The  Menshevik program, for example, stated that “the social basis of the Bolshevik dictatorship withers away and Bolshevism gradually evolves into a supraclass political system.” In this analysis, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat degenerated 

Proletarianization Contested

into a “Bonapartist state”—a regime that clung to power only so long as it could sustain a stalemate in the class struggle.¹¹⁷ But the Kadets saw in a state that elevates itself above class interests the remedy to, and not the sin of, the Bolshevik dictatorship. What for the socialists was a vice was for the Kadets a virtue. Proclaiming themselves the only “supraclass” party, the Kadets condemned Narkompros proletarianization policies, which they construed as a support of one single class at the expense of the rest of society. Reservations about university proletarianization did not mean wholesale Kadet rejection of all aspects of class policy. The Kadets accepted the charge that the toiling masses had been discriminated against by the tsarist regime and agreed with the socialist parties that measures had to be taken to expand enrollment. Their point was that the Bolshevik manipulation of the class profile of the universities had failed to truly benefit the lower classes. Furthermore, Kadet use of the term “democracy” to refer to the lower classes suggests that their social cosmology was not utterly remote from that of the socialists. An anonymous Kadet bewailed the absence of “democracy” in the universities: “It is difficult to say that the Soviet universities are democratic [demokraticheskie] institutions. If judged by the yardstick of the tsarist universities, they should be considered complete negations of ‘democracy.’ Just look at the prewar statistics: how abundant were peasants, townspeople and offspring of other urban estates among the students in those days!” In stating that “the questionnaires showed that some students . . . were of the most democratic background possible,” another anonymous Kadet also invested “democracy” with a social and not a political meaning.¹¹⁸ The Kadet commitment to “democracy” stemmed not from the messianic qualities of the lower classes, however, but from the legitimate position of “democracy” within the larger body politic—the Russian people—which, in the eyes of the Kadets, was the real revolutionary subject. The following Kadet lament seems to reproduce the standard charge of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries that the true proletariat was not helped by Narkompros admissions policies: The entire system of class-based admissions is essentially a mockery. Children of Red directors, members of syndicates—all of these representatives of the new Communist bourgeoisie appear among the “peasants and workers.” The university doors open readily to NEP men but those with no means of protection find themselves locked out of the university. The “toiling masses” are becoming indignant.¹¹⁶ 

                      

A minute matter of typography, however, was not insignificant; the inverted commas framing the “toiling masses” would never have appeared in a socialist text. Clearly, the Kadet author just cited wanted to communicate something more than the betrayal of the proletariat by the Bolshevik regime. Drawing attention to the signifier “toiling masses,” his text reproblemized the signified and questioned the identity of classes that the socialists unanimously regarded as productive. This was entirely in keeping with the Kadet denial that manual labor alone was productive activity; they expanded the Subject of History to include other classes alongside the proletariat and the peasantry. Whereas free professionals, experts, civil servants, and other nonproletarian social groups were described by the socialist press as “spongers,” “parasites,” and “exploiters,” for the Kadets each of these was an inalienable part of the “Russian People.” Replicating a number of the set phrases used by the socialist press in criticizing Narkompros proletarianization, and adopting the socialist meaning of “democracy,” the Kadet press set its emphasis in new areas and added its own shades of meaning. For the Kadets, “it is one thing to do all that one can to make universities accessible to the children of workers and peasants, and it is quite another thing to turn education into a privilege and to cultivate a nobility in reverse.”¹²⁰ The tsarist system of estate ranks and privileges was condemned by revolutionaries of all shades as “particularistic.” By claiming that the Bolsheviks were resuscitating old inequalities, and by putting into question the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, the Kadets won the sympathy of the entire revolutionary camp. But although all Russian revolutionary parties espoused universalism, each one of them accused the others of particularism. The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries accused the Kadets of knowing nothing about class analysis. Ultimately, they argued, the vacuous Kadets’ calling for formal equality rendered them accomplices of the bourgeoisie. The Kadets, in turn, accused socialists of supporting certain segments of the population and neglecting others, thus betraying the basic revolutionary idea of equality. Calling for a “universalist admissions principle,” the Kadets imbued the phrase with their own meaning. Kadet universalism was at once fuller and poorer than the universalism of the socialist parties, fuller because the Kadets rejected class exclusivism in admissions, poorer because the Kadets did not invest the idea of student equality with any concrete social content. Kadets described the typical Soviet student as shamelessly self-seeking. 

Proletarianization Contested

Passages from communiqués written by underground Kadet reporters expand on this: Workers’ faculty students dream only of high stipends. Separated from the plough and bench, unaccustomed to academic culture, they are driven by materialism. . . . Komsomol students are all spies and denouncers, corrupted by benefits and privileges. Their souls have been flattened by special drilling which conditions them to disdain everything clean, enlightened and sacred. . . . Occasionally one may witness a display of comradely sentiment in the best sense of the term among workers’ faculty students. When ill or in trouble, they help each other out. But this has nothing to do with universalist [universal’noe] or ecumenical [sobornoe] sentiments and is actually closer to group ethics, the expression of a sense of solidarity with your own kind.

The tone here is unmistakably patronizing. The text associates the personal ethics and rules of conduct of the Soviet students with “species” behavior. Whatever ethics developed in students, it was “instinctual.” The communiqués also drew an especially grim picture of the situation in the Bolshevized universities: “A constant struggle for survival, coupled with an official indoctrination, leads to the same result—the disregard of idealistic values, utilitarianism and a preoccupation with mundane issues.” Stitched into the Kadet narrative were a set of metaphors related to nature. Just as animals cannot transcend their drive for survival, the workers’ faculty students could not reach beyond the mental structures of the social groups into which they were born so as to identify with the entire social body.¹²¹ Already convinced that the Soviet student body was shot through with relentless particularism, Kadets saw their beliefs confirmed by the actions of Bolshevized students during the  purge. Particularly detestable in the eyes of one Kadet eyewitness were the routine insults cast by the workers’ faculty inmates at fellow students. “While shielding each other, they display a different attitude to the students they regard as ‘alien.’ The children of doctors, teachers, engineers, lawyers, and other employees are seen as extraneous elements. . . . Denounced before the Party cell, such students are thrown out of the university. The workers’ faculty students are motivated in such cases by the desire to protect their own skin [shkurnye interesy].” A period when all “independent” and “autonomous” elements were cast out from the universities, the purge was “the agony of Russian academic life. . . . The first to go were those students who had the misfortune to have been born and raised by 

                      

‘intelligentsia’ families. In pushing out those who inherited developed intellects, Communist students are guided by a selfish interest—the desire to secure employment after graduation.” While the Kadets believed that workers’ greed played a key role in turning the purge into such a senseless and cruel affair, they admitted that old class enmity could not be discounted as a source of inspiration either. We should not assign a secondary role to the workers’ old bitterness toward the intelligentsia. These days, the simple folk like to hate a suit and a cleanshaven face. The origins of the identification of such harmless attributes with oppressive bourgeois habits is not easy to explain. Perhaps the Bolshevik preaching of interclass animosity took its toll.¹²²

Kadets vehemently protested the  student purge. The rather unspecified embrace of the following leaflet secretly circulated in the spring of  (it is addressed simply to “students”) and the strong condemnation of all governmental encroachments on academic freedoms suggest Kadet authorship: Once again higher education has fallen victim to violence. The so-called purge is presently under way. Although it is alleged that students’ academic performance is the sole criterion in evaluating students everyone knows that this so-called academic purge is a pretext for the expulsion of conscious students! Though you went to the universities for the sake of knowledge, the government has been trying to turn you students into its agitators and propagandists. Long live scholarship! Long live university autonomy!¹²³

In addition to accusing the government of inappropriately politicalizing students, the Kadets accused the Bolsheviks of cynically manipulating both students and professors to request reduction in enrollments to the overcrowded universities, thus providing Narkompros with the means to legitimate the purge. Challenging the official claim that “overproduction of experts” was the real motive behind the purge, Kadets asked: “Wouldn’t a student purge only aggravate the problem of unemployment? All the purge has done is to remove thousands of able students from participating in the economic and cultural life of the nation.”¹²⁴ The notion that the purge restored social justice in this scenario was another myth functioning to permit the Bolsheviks to harm decent mental laborers. “The student purge was just more of the ancient principle of hurting the weak. Only this time the role of the kitchen-help children is played by the children of the ‘bourgeoisie and 

Proletarianization Contested

the intelligentsia.’” Much of the argument was ad hominem denunciations of the Bolshevized students—who, in this analysis, were the inspiration behind the purge—as narrow-minded and particularist. “Simpletons as they are, they cannot see beyond their own noses! Since they care only about themselves and mercilessly betray other students, who can expect them to defend academic freedom?”¹²⁵ The Kadets concurred that what made the inquiries of the purge commissions so terrible “was that they went far beyond students’ social origins to examine their way of thinking.” The universalism typical of the student mind was thus mercilessly exposed and turned into a target. This disrespect toward the bearers of the revolutionary tradition was a symptom of a larger problem—the Bolshevik inability to appreciate what the academic intelligentsia had done for Russia. “In the universities wrecked by the purge, the intelligentsia is now under strict constraints.” A participant in an émigré Kadet roundtable on the state of the contemporary intelligentsia lamented, “All the humanitarian strivings of the Russian intelligentsia have been tainted.”¹²⁶ According to the Kadets, the persecution of students and professors had to be inspired by the Bolshevik conviction that the intelligentsia’s spiritual autonomy could present citizens with ideological alternatives and destabilize the Soviet regime. “It is because the intelligentsia is such an independentminded social layer that the Bolsheviks repress it the most.” In a move identified by the Kadets as an attempt to limit the horizon of the Russian revolutionary compass, Narkompros compelled the intelligentsia to engage in partisan ventures. “All kinds of Communist activities are forced upon professors. Party students see them as little more than salaried know-how, so-called specialists.”¹²⁷ If the Kadets had a wide interpretation of who was the Subject of History, they had a very narrow interpretation of who might serve as the agent to ignite the consciousness of this subject. Coterminous with the notion of “independent thinking,” in Kadets’ eyes, the intelligentsia alone encapsulated human “autonomy” and “freedom.” What distinguished the attitudes of the Russian liberals from the attitudes of the Russian radicals, one scholar of Russian revolutionary culture incisively points out, was that the former maintained that the intelligentsia had nothing whatever to learn from the people, who were on the whole savages. “The intelligentsia were the only representatives of civilization in the country; their sole duty, therefore, was to enlighten the masses and thus bring Russia into the company of civilized 

                      

European nations. The intelligentsia had the duty . . . to assimilate the people into itself.”¹²⁸ Although these words were applied originally to nineteenthcentury Russian liberalism, this characterization is remarkably pertinent to Kadet sentiments in the s. The Russian liberals did not seek to model themselves on people who were in their eyes “ignorant savages” to be civilized, rather than “noble savages” whose spiritual purity was to be admired. The true intelligentsia whom Soviet students were to emulate were, of course, the Kadets. Beginning in the early s the Kadets claimed they could convert the workers’ faculties into laboratories of genuine academic traditions. One Kadet reporter stated that the psychology of the incoming students was transformed right in front of his eyes as soon as they came into contact with the glorious academic tradition. “The new students start by imitating the physical appearance of older students. Next, they adopt our oppositionist ideology and leave the Communist Party.” Another Kadet observer of the academic scene wrote that students with a traditional intelligentsia cast of mind still exerted cultural hegemony over the universities. “Close scrutiny shows that  percent of the students do not join the Bolsheviks, do not think that they should fortify the grip of Soviet Power over the university . . . and do not believe that thirst for knowledge as such is demeaning.” Still, this correspondent was alarmed that the Kadet tradition of student revolutionism was endangered and that “the new students . . . use the word ‘intelligentsia’ as a pejorative.”¹²⁹ A universalist attitude—that key trait of the true intelligentsia—was, the Kadets suspected, missing in the “new, Soviet intelligentsia.” Consequently, the party’s publicists wondered what to call those who underwent Soviet higher education. One Kadet newspaper pointed out that in comparison to the old intelligentsia, the new student intelligentsia “has a different social composition, a different cultural level and a different psychology and sociopolitical ideology.”¹³⁰ A contributer to another Kadet daily elaborated: The “new intelligentsia” is a name given by many to the new social group emerging from the peasant and worker social layers. But is “intelligentsia” proper in this case? By “intelligentsia” we used to understand a historically formed social layer that was both socially and ideologically separated from the rest of the population. The offsprings of various social groups could join it, provided they were united by common inclinations, a common contemplativeness, and a common social function that were known to be the marks of the intelligentsia. But do the social layers described as the “new intelligentsia” constitute a self-contained, autonomous social entity? 

Proletarianization Contested

The Kadets acknowledged that a wholly new type of mental laborer had come into being in Soviet Russia. Distinguished from mental laborers of the tsarist period by lower-class origins, and from the contemporary lower-class milieu by their relatively high level of education, these individuals did not transcend the particularist modes of thinking that were typical to their respective classes of origin: In contemporary Russia one can encounter members of the new intelligentsia who came from the ranks of workers, peasants, tsarist clerks, former low-tier bureaucrats, administrators, industrialists, or townsmen. What is amazing is that in becoming educated they did not break with their native milieu. Try to talk with a typical member of the “new” intelligentsia . . . and you will find that if he works in the village he will speak like a peasant, and if he is an employee in a stock exchange he will be saying what any normal shop assistant might say.

Education had, then, done nothing to free the “new Soviet intelligentsia” from its original, narrow class interests. What the Kadets idealized as an intelligentsia melting pot no longer produced universalist thinking. The new intelligentsia, “was not united by a common way of life” and did not constitute an independent agent that could be a legitimate heir to the true Russian intelligentsia. Intelligentsia without inverted commas was unique in its willingness to sacrifice itself and its thirst for heroism, although it knew full well that these promised only thorns. Such a frame of mind was unknown to the new intelligentsia. . . . The psychology characteristic of that group is particularist and businesslike; idealism and self-sacrifice are remote from it. A prosaic approach to life’s problems is a fair description of its mind-set.¹³¹

It was clear to the Kadets that those who operated according to vulgar utilitarianism could never join the intelligentsia and that the intelligentsia could harbor no vulgar utilitarian impulses. The intelligentsia, animated with a Kadet spirit, renounced comfort for the sake of human betterment. The new Soviet intelligentsia, by contrast, benefited from the Revolution, or, more precisely, from its degeneration: We must remind ourselves that the Revolution had the peasant rejoicing over land acquired and a land captain retired. Though it scattered the working class and downgraded skilled labor the Revolution opened new horizons for workers as well. . . . The feeling of social frustration stored up in the 

                       hearts of the best representatives of the humiliated classes was liberated. Furthermore, even the attitude of the educated classes toward Bolshevism is not entirely negative . . . now that many of them sit in the soviets and on all kinds of boards and cells, holding key positions even without being Party members.

By admitting that the Revolution opened “new horizons” to the new intelligentsia, the Kadets meant to say that it gave them career opportunities, not that it broadened their mental horizons. Under the Bolsheviks, the new intelligentsia acquired power, not consciousness, and thus made no advance toward emancipation. It is clear that the Kadet commentator was not unsympathetic to the desire for vengeance against their former oppressors that was felt by the lower classes as they saw themselves becoming the new educated elite. Ultimately, however, he condemned this craving as an elemental and completely visceral drive utterly divorced from conscious revolutionary action. His argument concluded by saying that it was better not to consider the Soviet intelligentsia an authentic intelligentsia at all.¹³² The famous sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who started out as a Socialist Revolutionary but who ended up closer to the Kadets in the s, had a different resolution for the semantic problem. Instead of denying it the title “intelligentsia,” Sorokin pointed out that “the new intelligentsia is roughly equivalent to what we know about the intellectuals of the West.” Sorokin did not see any overlap in the traits of the Soviet intelligentsia and of the old Russian intelligentsia: What we have here is not a district entity, the tormented intelligentsia that used to feel such immense guilt before the people, but an intelligentsia that comes directly from the people, that is a part of the people. The romantic, sentimental Self is alien to the new intelligentsia. Rather, the group is realistic, prosaic and business-like. It leans toward the technical vocational schools. It is reluctant to study humanistic subjects. The psychology of a . . . Chekhovian hero is foreign to it.¹³³

A “letter from Petrograd” probed further into the consciousness of the new intelligentsia. Its Kadet author derided the ethical iconoclasm that permeated all aspects of Soviet thought: “Not only the Domostroi, but Moses’ Ten Commandments, and even Kant’s categorical imperative are discarded! It is said that morals, as such, have no place in a proletarian ideology. Instead of moral codes, which have been declared abolished, class interests are set forth 

Proletarianization Contested

that can be interpreted however one likes.” The Kadet letter charged the new intelligentsia with particularism. Having deduced the objective from the subjective, the new intelligentsia forgot that its narrow needs and idiosyncrasies and the aspirations of humanity as a whole did not coincide at every turn. “Bukharin maintains that the youth, in order to become an ‘iron fist’ must develop rules of conduct that, thanks to the elimination of ethical foundations, have to be based on the Marxist credo. The latter is declared, in und für sich (in and for itself ), as something evident and not susceptible to criticism.” The denigration of universal ethics in the name of socialism was particularly preposterous in the eyes of the Kadets: For a person who thinks logically, it is clear that these ruminations of the influential Communist theoretician are based on a primitive conception of the nature of ethical conduct as something imposed upon the subject from the outside. The ethical code rejected by Bukharin in the first instance as a “fetish” is unexpectedly reaffirmed once the argument has run its course, with the assumption of the socialist ideal as compulsory for everybody. Logic is dealt with in the same manner as ethics. A few days ago Beriachevskii, a professor who belongs to the Red contingent, tacked to the walls of the university a proclamation, which read “the proletariat does not need logic.” No logic, no morals, no philosophy, no religion—this is the Communist imperative.

This ironic diatribe went beyond demonstrating that the thinking of the new intelligentsia was riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. The text presented a comprehensive tally of what renders thought universalist: logic, ethics, philosophy, and religion made humans capable of reaching beyond themselves and formulating altruistic principles of behavior. In desecrating these realms of thought, the Bolsheviks, the Kadets argued, had sunk into an abysmally narrow and particularist mode of reasoning. The nihilist kingdom of “everything is permitted” was thereby announced. “Should one then be surprised that the youth has been ideologically shaken and plunged into the vices of NEP?”¹³⁴ From the Kadet point of view, the reality of Soviet lawlessness and degeneration was to be expected after the Bolshevik onslaught on that prerequisite for social cooperation and harmony, the universalist reasoning of the old intelligentsia. Taken a step further, the Kadet argument challenged a crucial premise of socialist thought—that a particular class could embody universality. Repudiating the socialist belief that the egotism of the lower 

                      

classes was bound to disappear with the expansion of their knowledge, opening the way to universalism, the Kadets maintained that the road to the light could be paved only by the altruism of the supraclass Kadet intelligentsia. While the Kadets, alone among the Russian revolutionaries, rejected the identification of the messiah with one particular class, they remained firmly ensconced in eschatological thinking insofar as the aspiration to embody universality was as essential to their thought as it was to the thought of their socialist rivals. The Bolshevik Rejoinder

The  Bolshevik victory seemed to its adherents an obvious proof that they, and only they, were the true representatives of the proletariat. Rival parties could only pretend to have the backing of authentic workers. In the Bolshevik view, political and social changes were interdependent; the simplification of the country’s political spectrum and the crystallization of a one-party regime ran parallel to the purification of the class structure and its proletarianization. Simultaneously, the proletariat realized its messianic essence and all pseudo-messiahs were unmasked. As the ranks of the proletariat were purified and as unconscious workers, semi-peasants, and semiintellectuals were cast out, the representatives of their particularist interests —the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Kadets, respectively —were supposed to disappear over time as well. History had produced the perfect vehicle of salvation, the Bolshevik Party, the one and only representative for the proletarian. An anonymous Bolshevik stated in  that “the Bolsheviks are the working-class party” and that other parties only pretended to speak in the name of the working class. “SR influence is felt among the backward workers with close ties to the land. The Mensheviks defend the professional interests of the working-class aristocracy. The Menshevik party leads along a considerable section of unconscious workers, those concerned only with their shortsighted interests.”¹³⁵ The Bolsheviks applied the same analysis to that part of the intelligentsia that gradually purified itself and identified with the Bolshevik Party. Lenin distinguished two camps within the Marxist intelligentsia, “the genuinely revolutionary intelligentsia promoted by the proletariat [read: the Bolsheviks] and the middle-class, philistine, opportunist socialists. . . . The old intelligentsia either rejects socialism or appropriates it in its SR or Menshevik 

Proletarianization Contested

version, which is perhaps even worse.” According to Lenin, “only the tip of the iceberg of the Menshevik party was proletarian. The rest was petit intelligentsia.” Clearly, “petit” alluded to the middle-of-the-road, conciliatory, transitional character of the petite bourgeoisie under which the “petit intelligentsia” had to be subsumed.¹³⁶ Unable to mark themselves off that stratum completely, the Bolsheviks conceded that in the past the petit bourgeois intelligentsia, the historical precursor of the Party-messiah, had played a positive role in history. Bolshevik historiography, which eventually became orthodox Soviet historiography, set the Decembrists at the beginning of Russia’s emancipatory movement. Zinoviev depicted revolutionaries from the nobility as the protoCommunist intelligentsia. He described Ryleev, for example, as “an officer who linked himself with the people, who was allied with millions of workers and peasants . . . a true Communist who, had he lived today, would have volunteered for the Red Army.”¹³⁷ Following the Great Reforms and the social transmutations they ushered in, the noble-messiah was replaced by a Populist intelligentsia “drawn from various ranks.” As presented by the Bolsheviks this was not a supraclass intelligentsia but a lower-class, righteous, protoproletarian intelligentsia. Finally, as history neared consummation, capitalism gave birth to the Bolshevik intelligentsia, the messiah in its ultimate shape. It was the destiny of the Bolsheviks to serve as the last in the procession of messiahs, to build a conscious society, and thus to close for good the gap between the proletariat and its vanguard.¹³⁸ In dealing with the question of the identity of the true intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks went beyond the framework of static sociological analysis. Based on temporal, historico-eschatological considerations, their answer was that intelligentsia from different classes could act as messiahs at different times, depending on history’s current status. Sakulin explained that, “Hardly a social monolith, the intelligentsia is continuous due to the historical continuity of its ideology.”¹³⁹ It is important to bear in mind here that the Bolshevik concept of “ideology” deemphasized its negative aspect—the self-interested distortion of reality —described by the early Marx. Qualified in the Bolshevik usage by positive adjectives such as “progressive” or “proletarian,” “ideology” was used to mean something like an articulated foreknowledge of the correct road to emancipation passed on by one generation of revolutionaries to another.¹⁴⁰ According to Sakulin, 

                       when ideologists sacrifice themselves for the sake of an ideal, they achieve true greatness of spirit. Such ideologists link the entire meaning of their life with the fate of an idea, namely the fate of a class that is perhaps alien to them in the strictly social sense. These were the fighting ideologists, the ideologists who were leaders. The names of Herzen, Bakunin, Marx, and Lenin will occur to all. The Russian socialist intelligentsia offered abundant proof that its ideas had been built for the toilers’ sake.¹⁴¹

The crucible of the epochal events of  refined revolutionary ideology until only proletarian ideology was relevant. This led to the conclusion that the only true intelligentsia was now the Bolshevik intelligentsia. According to the Bolshevik eschatological narrative, the noble and the bourgeois intelligentsia were to be leaders of humanity at certain times. The Bolshevik historians of the s did not hesitate to refer to the “vanguard of the bourgeoisie” as the “intelligentsia” when they addressed the early modern period. At that time the bourgeoisie had supposedly performed a world historic role of removing the feudal fetters that hampered humanity’s advance. But the bourgeois intelligentsia was progressive only for a time, inevitably becoming retrograde when its historical mission was complete, whereas the proletarian intelligentsia could not possibly fall behind the course of history, because it was destined to bring about the end of time itself. In the words of Bukharin, “the difference between the bourgeois intelligentsia and our intelligentsia is that in the former case those being led, taken as a class, could never reach the level of their leaders, whereas in our society the people not only can become the leaders themselves but it is our very goal to bring about that state of things.”¹⁴² All this being said, the Bolsheviks were generally reluctant to admit that they were a reincarnation of the intelligentsia. When a participant at the  Politechnical Museum debate on the intelligentsia argued that “the October Revolution was an intelligentsia takeover, embodied by the Bolsheviks, a branch of the Russian intelligentsia,” his position was described by those present as a “paradoxical contention which the speaker is hardly able to explain, let alone prove.”¹⁴³ What lesser figures were berated for, Bukharin could candidly admit: “I have the privilege, or the liability, of coming from the intelligentsia myself.” Of course, Bukharin hastened to explain that the Bolshevik intelligentsia was unique insofar as it “would strive to abolish itself once all class boundaries had fallen.”¹⁴⁴ In the meanwhile (that is, while NEP lasted), the Bolshevik 

Proletarianization Contested

intelligentsia “had a historical right to guide the masses.” The messiah could not relinquish its tasks until history had been fully consummated. “We cannot ‘leave things as they are’; this would not be leadership of the country.”¹⁴⁵ One anonymous Bolshevik pundit compared the Party to the “brotherhood of the elect” (izbrannye), who take the worker by the hand and lead him to the light: “The maturity of the entire class is judged by the ingenuity of the vanguard. When the mass shuns engagement in the arena of class struggle and lacks its own initiative, the political rule of the proletariat comes to mean, simply, the rule of the proletarian elect.”¹⁴⁶ It is impossible to comprehend fully the Bolshevik perception of the relations between the “Party vanguard” and the “proletarian mass” unless we recall that the Bolsheviks understood NEP as an intermediary period between the “already” of the Revolution and the “not yet” of Communism. That  had “already” happened meant that the Russian proletariat recognized in the Bolsheviks a vanguard-emancipator; the “not yetness” of classless society—a society without leaders and followers—signified that the Russian proletariat, “not yet” entirely class conscious, still needed a conscious vanguard. This is why the subject in the “proletarian intelligentsia” (proletarskaia intelligentsiia), a term so widely used in the s, remained the “intelligentsia”; the adjective “proletarian” indicated nothing but the social origin of the group. The Bolsheviks hinted at the existence of a lingering gap, no matter how minimal, between the working class and its intelligentsia vanguard. Another term from the same semantic family, “intelligent proletarian” (intelligentyi proletarii), designated mental workers who sold labor power on the market. Since this term avoided any implication that these workers were class conscious, it too belonged to the language of the transitional period. Strictly speaking, the New Man belonged to neither of these groups but was instead a “worker-intelligent” (rabochii-intelligent) or an “intelligent-worker” (intelligent-rabochii); Communism was a period when pairs of proper nouns would oust all adjectives. No internal divisions were to bother the futuristic New Man; no aspect of his perfectly synthesized being would overshadow another. When asked whether the intelligentsia would always be needed, Lunacharskii expressed confidence that its lapse into oblivion was only a matter of time. Lunacharskii realized that the gap between the intelligentsia and the working class had “not yet” been entirely closed by the revolution. “The transmission of universal knowledge to the workers cannot be achieved immediately.” During the transitional period the Bolsheviks still had to have 

                      

recourse to “organizers and commanders. But since capitalism, the deep reason for the workers’ dopiness, has been destroyed, and since the Bolshevik government has accepted the enlightenment of the entire population as its task” (in other words, since the decisive eschatological event had already occurred), the objective conditions for the closure of that gap had also already appeared.¹⁴⁷ Reisner joined Lunacharskii in predicting that the intelligentsia was destined to fade away: “With the growth of the productive forces the numbers of the intelligentsia grow and the scope of its work widens. A moment will arrive when it will disintegrate, dissolved into the mass of the enlightened population. With the victory of the proletariat, theory will approximate life. At the end, thought and action will be completely unified.” Reisner warned against concluding that this epochal transformation meant the demise of what the intelligentsia stood for. Instead, with Communism, “the culture and creativity now borne by the intelligentsia . . . not only will not be destroyed, but will be liberated.” A similar eschatological thrust impelled Lunacharskii: “What does the end of History bode for the intelligentsia as a social group? Our final victory will bring the death of the intelligentsia as well as the disappearance of the proletariat.” An anonymous voice in the  “future of the intelligentsia” debate seconded these views: “With the fall of class society, the intelligentsia will dissolve into the population; only those who have grasped the laws of class struggle can understand that truism.”¹⁴⁸ Bolshevik demands for “the transformation of the proletariat into its own intelligentsia” were marked by a slight but significant change in syntax: under Communism, the proletariat no longer had to have its own intelligentsia—it had to be it.¹⁴⁹ Unified, the two messianic agencies were to lose their specificity. Kliuchnikov, a Kadet-turned-Bolshevik, explicated most fully the meaning of this synthesis: “The task of Communist Power is not the annihilation of the intelligentsia, leaving workers and peasants as they are, but the intellectualization of the workers and the peasant masses. . . . When everyone has become the intelligentsia the intelligentsia will disappear.” Responding to Kliuchnikov, Lunacharskii noted that, “When the speaker says that the ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a member of the intelligentsia, he means that when everybody has become a complete human being the independent existence of the intelligentsia will be rendered obsolete.”¹⁵⁰ The Party leadership distanced itself from the intelligentsia-baiting that was common in the s. An intelligentsia with a limited lifespan did not 

Proletarianization Contested

have to be disparaged while the transitional period lasted. To an anonymous note that asked, “Must we create a new intelligentsia? Can we not jump directly into a period without an intelligentsia?” Lunacharskii responded: “We treat the Dictatorship of the Proletariat seriously, even though it is temporary, do we not? We should treat the intelligentsia with equal seriousness even though it is a transient category!” This was no heresy uttered by a soft-line Bolshevik. Lenin himself said that “nothing will take its finished form until the construction of Communism is complete” and warned that even a proletarian revolution was incapable of erasing instantly the distinction between mental and manual labor.¹⁵¹ In State and Revolution, Lenin contended that “the antithesis between mental and physical labor—one of the principal sources of modern social inequality—cannot on any account be removed immediately by the mere conversion of the means of production into public property, by the mere expropriation of capitalists.”¹⁵² According to the Bolsheviks, so long as history is flowing, the formation of the messiah relies on a necessarily dialectical process: “A class is always in the making. There is no one moment, nor can there be one, when it may be said that the process of class formation has been completely accomplished. The end point of the process of class formation is set only by the complementary process of class disintegration, which is the full realization of Communism.”¹⁵³ Come the End of History, the principle that was responsible for the fissures within the Subject of History, that source of human alienation, would plummet into oblivion.



GLOSSARY

Cheka

All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution

desiatina

land measure equivalent to . acres

GPU

State Political Administration

kulak

a rich peasant exploiter

Komsomol

All-Russian Leninist Communist Youth League

Narkompros

Narodnyi kommissariat prosveshcheniia, Bolshevik equivalent of the ministry of education

SD

Social Democratic

SR

Socialist Revolutionary

Sovnarkom

Council of People’s Commissars

Vesenkha

Supreme Council of National Economy

VTsIK

All Russian/Union Central Executive Committee of Soviets

VTsSPS

All Russian/Union Central Council of Trade Unions



NOTES

Abbreviations Used in the Notes (see also Glossary) CW

K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works

d./dd.

delo/dela (archival file/s)

f.

fond (archival collection)

GANO

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Novosibirskoi oblasti

l./ll.

list/listy (document page/s)

op.

opis’ (inventory number of archive file)

PANO

Partiinyi arkhiv novosibirskoi oblasti

PATO

Partiinyi arkhiv tomskoi oblasti

PSS

V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, fifth edition (Moscow, –)

SU

Sbornik dekretov i postanovlenii raboche-krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva po narodnomu obrazovaniiu

TsGA IPD

Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov (Leningrad)

TsGA SPb

Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga

TsGAOR(L)

Tsentral’nnyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Oktiabr’skoi Revoliutsii (Leningrad)

Introduction . In the lion’s share of literature dedicated to the formation of the Soviet system, Marxism is reduced to mere jargon, an “empty talk” or window dressing one has to look through rather than look at. In recent years the historiographical reductionism seems to have abated somewhat. A sophisticated approach to the significance of Marxism in the Soviet experience can be seen in M. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, ); S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, ); and A. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford, ).

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         ‒  . See, for example, the very early discussion of the Bolshevik concept of the New Man in P. Pascal, En Communisme. Mon journal de Russie, - (Lausanne, ), pp. -; Especially valuable is the classic, Stepan Podlubnyi, Tagebuch aus Moskau, ed. J. Hellbeck (Munich, ). Throughout this text, for general ease and clarity, I follow the traditional scholarly use of “Man” to refer to both sexes of the human race. This is not to imply that the male gender is in any way different in value or importance from the female. . H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, ). . Terms such as “Subject,” “History” and “Man” will appear in this book sometimes with a capital letter and sometimes in the lower case, depending on whose voice is being invoked. When I speak in my own voice the lower case will be employed. When I cite or paraphrase Marxist philosophers or contemporary Russian voices, however, I capitalize these words, which were originally meant to capture the singularity of the historical process and the uniqueness of the agents consummating it. In the s and s, a period when historians still cared about ideas, these terms were indeed capitalized. Unfortunately, with the advent of social history, this practice was abandoned. In today’s literature there is something of a boycott of capitalization. The resulting terms “communists,” “bolsheviks,” and “party” are part of a language which, in my view, attempts to normalize, and even trivialize, Soviet history. Every country, so the argument goes, has political institutions, ideologies, and social agents. Why would anyone allow twentieth-century Russianists to claim that they are somehow unique? The trouble with that approach, however, is that the reader is invited to forget the specifics of the Communist language, thereby remaining unaware of the claim Russian Marxists made to the only truthful, just, and scientific interpretation of reality, and of the impact of that claim on the historical course of events. . A. Mayer, Leninism (New York, ), p. n. . The importance of Marxism for the evolution of the Soviet political system is forcefully argued by Leszek Kolakowski in his “Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” in R. Tucker, Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, ). . M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York, ), pp. –. . A. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley, ), p. . . M. Gorkii, “Vladimir Ilich Lenin,” Kommunisticheskii internatsional, no.  (). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the original are my own. . Quoted in V. Shishkin, Tak skladyvalas’ revoliutsionnaia moral’ (Moscow, ), p. . . Pravoslavnoe russkoe slovo, no.  (), pp. –. For Social Democratic criticism of Christian passive morality, see I. Ditsgen, Religiia sotsial-demokratii (St. Petersburg, ). . For the beginning of this trend, see G. Freeze, “A Social Mission for Russian Orthodoxy: The Kazan Requiem of  for the Peasants in Bezdna,” in Imperial Russia, –: State, Society, Opposition—Essays in Honor of March Raeff, ed. M. Shatz and E. Mendelsohn (DeKalb, Illinois, ). . A. Klinghoffer, Red Apocalypse: The Religious Evolution of Soviet Communism (New York, ).

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         ‒   . E. Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York, ), p. . . The interpretation of the Russian Orthodox tradition as passive and fatalistic is argued in G. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (Cambridge, England, ). The Russian historian Pavel Miliukov detected in the nineteenth century a process of transition from “ritualized piety towards the religion of the soul.” Miliukov documented an evolution of the Russian religious mind from mass worshiping of rituals (the essence of traditional Orthodoxy) toward a deep individual belief (characteristic of sectarians). P. Miliukov, Outlines of Russian Culture: Religion and the Church (New York, ), pp. –. . This book does not dwell on the interaction between Marxism and Orthodox philosophy in Russia. This fascinating question has already received some attention in scholarship. See, for example, N. Berdiaev, The Origins of Russian Communism, trans. R. French (Ann Arbor, ), and E. Sarkisyanz, Russland und der Messianismus des Orients (Tübingen, ). Laurie Manchester’s study of the worldview of priests’ sons who left the clerical estate discusses the transition from Orthodoxy to Marxism and provides a background to the evolution of individual belief against the background of the secularization process in Russia. Manchester demonstrates that priests’ sons who became prominent members of the Russian Marxist movement, while renouncing the Orthodox ritualism of the clerical estate, remained inspired by the religious values they had been brought up with, now reinterpreted in a secular fashion. One of them wrote, “I renounce the Orthodox faith because I consider it necessary to serve God with love and with acts of love, and not with rituals.” Discarding the traditional Orthodox humility and passive attitude to the world, priests’ sons embraced political activism with the intention of building the kingdom of God on earth, here and now. L. Manchester, “The Secularization of the Search for Salvation: The Self-Fashioning of Orthodox Clergymen’s Sons in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review , no.  (). See, for a more extensive treatment, her excellent “Secular Ascetics: The Mentality of Orthodox Clergymen’s Sons in Late Imperial Russia” (PhD. dissertation, Columbia University, ). . For the classic Marxist statement that the intelligentsia should be committed to progress and development, see P. Baran, “The Commitment of the Intellectual,” Monthly Review  (). For the criticism of this messianic view, see R. Aron, L’Opium des Intellectuals (Paris, ), and L. Kolakowski, “Intellectuals Against Intellect,” Daedalus, no.  (). . M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, ), pp. –. . Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics, pp. –. . G. Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, – (Cambridge, England, ), p. ; L. Hunt, “Introduction,” The New Cultural History (Berkeley, ), p. . . As J. Rancière and D. Ried put it. F. Ewald, interview with J. Rancière, “Qu’estce que c’est la classe ouvrière?” Magazine Littéraire  (July–August ), p. ; D. Ried, “The Night of the Proletarians: Deconstruction and Social History,” Radical History Review, no. – (), pp. –. . The relation of the proletariat to the intelligentsia in  is often posed as a

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         question of the legitimacy of the revolutionary leaders to represent the former. The political theorist John Plamenatz, for example, observes that “the Russian Bolsheviks, at the moment of their triumph in November , had far less than the German SocialDemocrats the right to call themselves ‘the party of the proletariat.’ ” Plamenatz’s argument that the Leninist intelligentsia usurped the proletariat’s right to self-expression is echoed by Leonard Shapiro and Adam Ulam, the two major proponents of the totalitarian school, who argue that the Bolshevik party was made up of members of the intelligentsia who had no organic links with the working masses. To discredit the totalitarian interpretation, doyens of the revisionist historiography William Chase and Arch Getty executed a meticulous prosopographical study of the “class composition” of the Bolshevik cadres in , to prove their own opinion that “nearly half of the leadership cadre . . . was composed of workers from the bench.” This, of course, comes to legitimate the Bolshevik seizure of power as not an intelligentsia coup but a genuine proletarian takeover. Both schools reify messianic entities into social groups and are oblivious of the eschatological framework that generates their questions. J. Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London, ), p. ; L. Shapiro, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State (Cambridge, England, ); A. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (New York, ); W. Chase and J. A. Getty, “The Moscow Bolshevik Cadres of : A Prosopographic Analysis,” Russian History, no.  (), p. . The debate between the pro-Menshevik sympathizers in the West and pro-Bolshevik Soviet historians as to which party was supported by the “conscious” workers is inspired by the same analytical framework. The pro-Menshevik historians argue that “workers who supported the Bolsheviks . . . were typically employed in giant Russian-owned factories located predominantly in the eastern part of European Russia. These factories were, from the point of view of capital investment and technological sophistication, and in comparison with foreign-owned industry further to the west, relatively backward. Workers in these plants were relatively unskilled and mainly of Great Russian origin. And, most significantly, they retained especially strong ties to the land.” In a typical Menshevik fashion, Bolshevism is equated here with the East and the peasantry —Marxist icons of backwardness. By contrast, Menshevism is said to have been “strong where industry was more modern and foreign-owned; where workers were more highly skilled, paid, educated and westernized; where workers had relatively few, weak ties to the countryside.” Menshevism, in this flattering scenario, is represented by the West, heredity proletariat, and enlightenment—in short, with consciousness. As would be expected, Soviet historians reverse this hierarchy and make Bolshevism the epitome of consciousness. Thus they claim that “workers from the industrialized center of Russia [who supported the Bolsheviks] were the preferred candidates for the Capri school,” because they were more “progressive.” Consider Primerov, a Soviet historian writing in , who favorably reviews a study of working-class political consciousness from the early s. Investigating the local workers who leaned toward Menshevism, the s study, carried out by Primerov’s Bolshevik predecessors in the city of Tula, attempted to prove that these workers either had ties with the land or were imbued with petit bourgeois acquisitiveness. The goal of

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         such studies, whether from the early s or the late s, was the same: to dismiss Menshevik workers as proletarians lacking consciousness. The most conscious and the best politicized among the workers supported, in this scenario, the Bolshevik political demands and subverted the attempt of the Menshevik liquidators to derail the revolution in a conciliatory, petit bourgeois direction. Both the Bolshevik and the Menshevik proponents claim to speak in the name of the eschatologically advanced workers, framing their rivals as the mouthpiece for the workers who have false consciousness. The arguments mirror each other. For the proto-Menshevik argument, see R. Brym, The Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism: A Sociological Study of Intellectual Radicalism and Ideological Divergence (London, ), p.  (ties to the land); D. Lane, The Roots of Russian Communism (Assen, ), pp. –, – (countryside); for the proto-Bolshevik argument, see “Otkrytoe pis’mo rabochim Moskovskoi organizatsii RSDRP,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no.  (), p.  (Capri). The Bolshevik argument is echoed throughout Soviet historiography—see, for example, A. Pankratova, Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia, – gg (Moscow, ), and E. Primerov, Bor’ba partii za Leninskoe edinstvo svoikh riadov, – (L’vov, ) pp. –. . The sociological interpretation of the intelligentsia dominates the historiography of Soviet Russia. Soviet and Western historians alike have emphasized that the intelligentsia could not be dispensed with immediately after the revolution because there was not yet anyone in Bolshevik Russia with sufficient knowledge to fulfill the functions of the intelligentsia. Important though this argument is, accenting the concrete needs of the Soviet state omits from consideration the question as to what, in the Bolshevik mind, the intelligentsia was and had to become. Addressing the situation in the s, Sheila Fitzpatrick operates with the notion of two “elite groups,” the Bolsheviks and the intelligentsia: “Bolshevik . . . claims to leadership,” she writes, “rested solidly on a sense of moral enlightenment and duty as did those of the intelligentsia.” Fitzpatrick ultimately elects to explain this affinity by common mentalities that were the property of the two classes. Once again, language loses out to social analysis. Read also finds that the s ruling elite was split between two camps: “former members of the intelligentsia” and “an increasingly strident, confident and aggressive group of ‘proletarians’ [who] emerged from lower levels of Russian society.” I doubt whether it is worthwhile to pay so much attention to the social background of the new elite: many proponents of absolute proletarian purity, with Aleksandr Bogdanov an obvious case in point, were “petit bourgeois” in terms of their social origins. Still, they deemed themselves legitimate participants in the Bolshevik discourse. The debate over proletarian purity addressed by Read had to do with divergent theoretical interpretations of eschatology and should not be construed as a veiled clash between different social groups within the Bolshevik camp. The above quote from Fitzpatrick is from: S. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, ), pp. –. Read has been cited from: C. Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (London, ), p. . See also: K. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, (Princeton, ); N. Lampert, The Technical

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          ‒   Intelligentsia and the Soviet State (New York, ); E. Cinella, “Etat proletarien et science ‘bourgeoise’: Les spetcy pendant les premieres annees du pouvoir sovietique,” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique, vol.  (); V. Ul’ianovskaia, Formirovanie nauchnoi intelligentsii v SSSR, – gg. (Moscow, ); S. Fediukin, Velikii oktiabr’ i intelligentsia (Moscow, ); Idem, Sovetskaia vlast’ i intelligentsiia: Iz istorii vovlecheniia staroi intelligentsii v stroitel’stvo sotsializma (Moscow, ); Idem, Partiia i intelligentsiia (Moscow, ); L. Ivanova, Formirovanie sovetskoi nauchnoi intelligentsii,  (Moscow, ); P. Alekseev, Revoliutsiia i nauchnaia intelligentsiia (Moscow, ); Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia, XX vek (Moscow, ); M. Glavatskii, Istoriografiia formirovaniia intelligentsii v SSSR v perekhodnyi period (Svedrlovsk, ). Although the post-Soviet work on the subject of the intelligentsia is very interesting, it largely remains sociological in orientation. See in this regard the following interesting collections of articles: Poisk novykh podhkhodov k izucheniu intelligentsii: problemy teorii, metodologii, istochnikovedeniia i istoriografii (Ivanovo, ); Intelligentsiia v sovetskom obshchestve (Kemerovo, ); Diskriminatsiia intelligentsii v poslerevoliutsionnoi Sibiri (e-nach. kh godov) (Novosibirsk, ). An exception to this literature is C. Rougle’s “The Intelligentsia Debate in Russia, –,” Art, Society, Revolution in Russia, –, (Stockholm, ). . Alan Wildman shows that in the late s Marxism “became just as amorphous and adaptable ideology as in its day Populism,” so much so that for this time period we can speak of “Marxified liberals,” “Marxified radical democrats,” and so on. A. Wildman, “The Russian Intelligentsia of the s,” Slavic Review  (), p. . On the subject of permeation of Western Marxism into the Russian radical tradition, see C. Weill, Marxistes russes et la social-démocratie allemande, – (Paris, ); C. Read, Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, –: The Vekhi Debate and Its Intellectual Background (London, ). . For the argument that the distinction between intellectual and sociopolitical history should be dispensed with, see D. LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. D. LaCapra and S. Kaplan (Ithaca, ); H. White, “The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History,” in The Content of the Form (Baltimore, ). . Peter Holquist’s recent study of Russia during the Civil War contrasts the traditional political practices of the Whites toward the population with the Bolsheviks’ innovative recourse to Marxist propaganda as a medium to shape constituents into messianic zealots who identified with the young regime. The White state-building attempts reproduced the repressive techniques of the late imperial government, which taught the population to obey without questioning. The Whites left the improvement of the human soul to the Church and the priest. Imbued with messianism, the Bolsheviks were more holistic in their approach. The nascent Red state embarked on nothing less than the engineering of the human soul. P. Holquist, “The Russian Vendée: The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Countryside, –” (PhD. dissertation, Columbia University, ). . Isaac Deutscher is the father of the Neo-Trotskyist interpretation of Soviet his-

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          ‒   tory. By contrast, Steven Cohen advances what might be called the Neo-Bukharinist position. At first sight, Cohen’s agenda is the opposite of Deutscher’s—his hero is Bukharin, the champion of the peasantry, not the archproletarian and antipeasant Trotsky. But in his more general approach, Cohen does not differ much from the NeoTrotskyists. His thesis boils down to the proposition that Leninism was a viable, just, socioeconomic system thwarted by Stalin’s distortions. Given the shared background, the question of the best historical alternative (Was Bukharin’s Rightism or Trotsky’s Leftism the best solution to Russia’s problems?) appears secondary. I. Deutscher, “From Leninism to Stalinism,” in Russia After Stalin (Oxford, ); S. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, – (New York, ). . W. Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, – (Urbana, Ill., ), pp. –, . . L. Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York, ), pp. , . . R. Pethybridge, One Step Backward, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics in the New Economic Policy (Oxford, ), p. ; R. Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (New York, ), p. , quoted in M. Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York, ), p. . . Lewin, Making of the Soviet System, pp. , , . . Pethybridge, One Step Backward, pp. –, . . Lewin, Making of the Soviet System, p. ; R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, ), p. ; Pethybridge, One Step Backward, p. . . S. Fitzpatrick, “The Bolshevik Dilemma: Class, Culture, and Politics in the Early Soviet Years,” Slavic Review  (), pp. , , . . S. Fitzpatrick, “New Perspectives on the Civil War,” in D. Koenker, W. Rosenberg and R. Suny (eds.), Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War. Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, ), pp. -; and the discussion in S. Fitzpatrick, “L’Usage Bolchevique de la ‘class’ ”: Marxisme et construction de l’identite individuelle,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, ed. P. Bourdieu, no.  (November ) as well as S. Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History,  (December ). . Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, pp. –. . S. Fitzpatrick, “The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society,” in S. Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowich and R. Stites (eds.), Russia in the Era of NEP. Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, ), pp. -. . Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. . . Ibid., pp. –. . Ibid., pp. , . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . For a powerful rebuttal of such views, see B. Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. C. Rougle (Princeton, ). . Alan Ball—who argues that “a lengthy period of transition . . . between the ‘so-

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          ‒   cialist revolution’ and the actual attainment of socialism has been made by Communist revolutionaries in other economically backward and ravaged countries”—is a notable exception to the general tendency of historians to see NEP as a strictly Soviet affair. A. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The NEPmen, – (Berkeley, ), p. . . For a summary of the social history’s view of NEP, see W. Rosenberg, “Understanding NEP Society and Culture in the Light of New Research,” in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. S. Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowich, and R. Stites (Bloomington, ), pp. –. . O. Cullmann, Salvation in History (New York, ), pp. –. . Ibid., p. . . K. Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, ), pp. , . . Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism,” forthcoming. . For the notion of society as an artifact, see M. Halberstam, “Liberalism, Totalitarianism, and the Aesthetic: An Investigation into the Modern Conception of Politics” (PhD. dissertation, Yale University, ). For the notion of imagined community, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, ). . M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, – (New York, ), pp. –. . S. Fitzpatrick, “Stalin and the Making of the New Elite, –,” Slavic Review  (), pp. –. See also p. . . Ibid., p. . See also D. Lane, “The Impact of Revolution on the Selection of Students for Higher Education: Soviet Russia, –,” Sociology, no.  (), pp. –; O. Anweiler, “Educational Policy and Social Structure in the Soviet Union,” in Social Change in the Soviet Union, ed. B. Meissner (Notre Dame, ), p. . . J. McClelland, “Proletarianizing the Student Body: The Soviet Experience During the New Economic Policy,” Past and Present, no.  (), p. . . I. Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. P. Miller (London, ), p. . . I. Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society, no. – (), p. . . If this study is primarily dedicated to Marxism (and the second part of the study even more narrowly to Bolshevism) it is not because this intellectual current was unique in its eschatological motivations but, rather, because Russian Marxism was allowed the opportunity to realize its potential, consigning the revolutionary eschatologies of its competitors to mere projects. . Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, p. . . I. Halfin, “From Darkness to Light: Student Communist Autobiographies of the s,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, no. , (). . J. Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, –,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, no.  (). . I. Halfin and J. Hellbeck, “Steven Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain and the Soviet Subject,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, no., ().

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          ‒   . P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, England, ), p. . . R. Barthes, “Historical Discourse,” in Structuralism, ed. M. Lane (London, ); H. White, “The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact,” Clio  (); P. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Social Research, vol.  (); L. Gossman, “History and Literature,” in The Writings of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. R. Canary and H. Cozicki (Madison, ); S. Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction (Princeton, ); Iu. Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –.

Chapter 1: Marxism as Eschatology . LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History,” p. ; P. Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques (), quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, ), p. . . H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass., ), p. ; J. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origins and Growth (New York, ), p. ; Carl Becker, “Progress,” The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, vol.  (); G. Hildebrand, ed., The Idea of Progress (Berkeley, ); T. E. Mommsen, “St. Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress: The Background of the City of God,” Journal of the History of Ideas, no.  (). . “Eschatology” can be defined as the “ensemble of thoughts that express religious hopes concerning the coming of the world regarded as ideal.” J. Hering, Le royaume de dieu et sa venue (Strasbourg, ), p. . Z. Werblowsky understands under “eschatology” the “science or teaching concerning the last things” and alludes to the view of Marxism as an eschatological movement. Z. Werblowsky, “Eschatology,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade, vol.  (), p. . . F. Schelling, The Ages of the World (New York, ), p. . . An interested reader should consult Abrams’s work on the intellectual origins of Romanticism, which is an impressive study of the secularization of religious ideas. Abrams traces the progression from Plotinus to Christian Neoplatonists, to the esoteric tradition linking the thought of Giordano Bruno and other Renaissance philosophers with Jacob Boehme, German Pietists, and English Inner Light Theologians, all leading to Romantic Apocalypticism. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. –. The literature showing Marx’s roots in Hegelianism and Hegel’s roots in Lutheranism is also helpful for the presentation of Marxism as a secularized Christianity. The main recent work to discuss these issues is L. Dickey, Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, – (Cambridge, England, ). . For studies that trace the influence of specific Orthodox religious beliefs on Russian Marxist notions, see, for example, M. Agursky, “L’aspect millénarist de la révolution bolchevique,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique  (); J. Bergmann, “The Image of Jesus in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The Case of Russian Marxism,” International Review of Social History  (). . Löwith, Meaning in History, pp. –.

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          ‒   . C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, England, ), pp. –. . K. Marx, Capital (London ), vol. , p.  . H. Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” Telos  (), pp. –. . Marx, Capital, vol. , pp. –. . E. Voegelin, “The Genesis of Gnostic Socialism,” in From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. J. Hallowell (Durham, ), p.  (quote). For commentary on this “tragic” disjunction between the human capacity and the human reality in Marxist thought, see J. Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel (New York, ), p. ; Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, pp. , , ; H. Parsons, “The Prophetic Mission of Karl Marx,” Journal of Religion, no.  (), p. . . The Christian roots of the concept of alienation are explored in N. Rotenstreich, “On the Ecstatic Sources of the Marxist Concept of ‘Alienation,’ ” Review of Metaphysics, vol.  (–). The literature on Marx’s notion of alienation is vast. See, for example, I. Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London, ); L. Easton, “Alienation and History in the Early Marx,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research  (); J. O’Neill, “The Concept of Estrangement in the Early and Later Writings of Karl Marx,” Philosophy and Phenemenological Research, vol.  (). . F. Engels, On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Moscow, ), p. ; K. Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York, ), pp. –; Löwith, Meaning in History, p. . See also R. Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh, ), pp. –; N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York, ), pp. –. L. Wessell, Prometheus Bound: The Mythic Structure of Karl Marx’s Scientific Thinking (Baton Rouge, ), p. . . I do not explore here the issue of the influence of Greek thought on Christianity. Suffice it to point out that the Greek world also shared a widespread belief in an initial degradation of the human race and that the idea of human universality apparently came to Christianity from the Stoa. Still, scholars agree that Greek philosophers were reluctant to accept the idea of progress. Bury, Idea of Progress, pp. –, –; E. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford, ), p. . . Marx quoted from R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, ), p. . . Wessell, Prometheus Bound, p. ; Marx, Value, Price and Profit, p. . . E. Tuveson, “The Millenarian Structure of ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ ” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. Patrides and J. Wittreich (Ithaca, ), pp. , –. The Marxist notion of universal history may be compared to McGinn’s definition of apocalypticism as “a sense of the unity and structure of history conceived as a divinely predetermined totality [combined with] pessimism about the present and conviction of its imminent crisis; and . . . belief in the proximate judgment of evil and triumph of the good, the element of vindication.” B. McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York, ), p. . . M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York, ), pp. –. . W. Pannenberg, Revelation as History (London, ), thesis no. .

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          ‒   . Löwith, Meaning in History, pp. , . . M. Abrams, “Apocalypse: Theme and Variations,” in Patrides and Wittreich, The Apocalypse, p. . . My discussion here draws on C. H. Dodds, “Eschatology and History,” in The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (London, ), pp. –. . Ibid., pp. –. . Cullmann, Salvation in History, p. . . K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (New York, ), p.  (quote); Dodds, Apostolic Preaching, p. . See also R. Williams, “The Russian Revolution and the End of Time: –,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, no.  (), p. . . Marx quoted in R. Tucker, “Marx and the End of History,” in The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York, ), p. . . J. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New York, ), p. . See also the discussion in E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (New York, ), p. . . Typological exegesis played a major role in the actions of Russian Marxists during the revolution. Later on, it contributed to Stalin’s success in defeating Trotsky at the intra-Party struggles of the s. Stalin convinced the Party that Trotsky wanted to be the “Napoleon of the Russian Revolution.” See J. Keep, “: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd,” Soviet Studies, no.  (–); D. Shlapentokh, “The Images of the French Revolution in the February and Bolshevik Revolutions,” Russian History, no.  (). . Löwith, Meaning in History, p. . . Cullmann, Salvation in History, pp. –. . Ibid., p. . . “The Concept of Counterrevolution in Marxist Theory,” Studies in Soviet Thought, vol.  (). For the meaning of the term “counterrevolution” in early twentieth-century Russia, see Materialy k istorii russkoi kontrrevoliutsii (St. Petersburg, ). . Löwith, Meaning in History, pp. –; E. Brunner, “The Problem of Time,” in God, History and Historians (New York, ), p. ; Henri-Irénée Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire (Paris, ), pp. –. . Words by Eugene Pottier, music by Pierre Degeyter (). . XVII s”ezd veesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii bol’shevikov: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, ), p. . . P. Friedrich, “Some Recent Works on Communism and Christianity,” Slavic Review  (), p. . . Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. . . H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, ), pp. –. . This is a commentary on Plotinus by Proclus, The Elements of Theology, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford, ), p. . . L. Kolakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, ), vol. , pp. –. . W. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (London, ). . P. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston, ), pp. , . See also “Escha-

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          ‒   tology,” in Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. E. Ferguson (New York, ), pp. –. . Origen, De Principiis I.vi.–, quoted from Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. . . Ibid., p. . . Origen is cited in Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, pp. –. . H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (Boston, ), pp. –; and K. Rudolf, Gnosis: The Nature and History of an Ancient Religion (Edinburgh, ), pp. –. . E. Topitsch, “Marxismus und Gnosis,” Sozialphilosophie zwischen Ideologie und Wissenschaft (Neuwied, ). . E. Topitsch, “Seelenvorstellungen in Mythos und Metaphysik,” Mythos, Philosophie, Politik: Zur Naturgeschichte der Illusion (Freiburg, ). . G. Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism (London, ), p. ; See also Rudolf, Gnosis, pp. –. The Greek word gnosis (γνοσισ) made its way into Latin in the form of the verb gnoscere, which means “to learn to know.” From this, an additional Latin verb derives—scire—which has a similar meaning. The present tense form of this verb is sciens, from where comes sciencia—knowledge. The addition of the prefix “con-” (for collective knowledge) produces conscientia, widely known in its Christian usage. In Marxism, the ethical, subjective meaning of consciousness was fused with the other sense of consciousness, which after Descartes came to denote an awareness of something objective outside of Man. Reviving something of the original duality of the Latin conscientia, which had both an ethical and an epistemological sense, the Marxist “consciousness” combined the sense of knowledge of the external world and the sense of a moral imperative residing in the internal soul. I thank Dorit Reiner for this etymological clarification. . E. Pagels, The Origins of Satan (New York, ), p. . . Rudolf, Gnosis, pp. –. . Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, p. ; Tucker, “Marx and the End of History,” p. . . Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, p. . . Schelling is quoted in Abrams, “Apocalypse: Theme and Variations,” p. ; Hegel is cited from The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford, ), p. . . F. Engels, “On Social Relations in Russia,” The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. –. . Abrams, “Apocalypse: Theme and Variations,” p. ; see also Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. , p. . On Gnostic views regarding the “duration” of history, see also J. Zaden, “Gnostic Ideas on Fall and Salvation,” Numen, vol.  (). On the relation between the First Creation and the Second Creation in Christianity, see N. Dahl, “Christ, Creation and the Church,” in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, ed. William David Williams (Cambridge, England, ). On historical time as a spiral, see L. Boia, La fin du monde: Une histoire sans fin (Paris, ), p. . . Jonas, Gnostic Religion, pp. –. See also pp. , . . Voegelin, “Genesis of Gnostic Socialism,” p. ; K. Papaioannou, Consécration de l’histoire (Paris, ), pp. –; see also C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image

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          ‒   (Cambridge, England, ), pp. –. The difference between the Neoplatonic and the Gnostic worldviews is comprehensively treated in A. Armstrong, “Gnosis and Greek Philosophy,” in Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas, ed. M. Krause, J. Robinson, G. Widengren, and B. Aland (Göttingen, ). . K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (henceforth CW ) (New York, ), vol. , p. . . Topitsch, “Marxismus und Gnosis.” . E. Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, ), pp. –. . E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, ) . Rudolf, Gnosis, pp. –, –. . G. MacRae, “Apocalyptic Eschatology and Gnosticism,” in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August –, , ed. D. Hellholm (Tübingen, ), p. . For a similar argument see W. Schmithals, The Apocalyptic Movement: Introduction and Interpretation (New York, ), p. . . R. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge, England, ), pp. –. Augustine’s argument appears in City of God xviii.–. . My discussion here is derivative of N. Gilbert, “The Concept of Will in Early Latin Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, no.  (). The main sources for the Greek view of the moral action are Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus II.xiv.; Plato, Laws d. Augustine’s views on moral action appear in De Libero Arbitrio II... Augustine, City of God xiv.. . Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, p. ; Bury, Idea of Progress, p. . . M. Jay, review of Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age in History and Theory  (), p. . . Both Irenaeus and Tertullian cited from Rudolf, Gnosis, p. . . Ibid., p. . See also E. Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia, ); W. Schmithals, “The Corpus Paulinum and Gnosis,” in The New Testament and Gnosis, ed. A. Logan and A. Wedderburg (London, ). . S. Petrement, A Separate God: The Origins and Teaching of Gnosticism (San Francisco, ), pp. –. . “Eschatology,” Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, p. ; Rudolf, Gnosis, pp. –. . Burnet cited from E. Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley, ), pp. –, . . F. Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. F. Anderson (New York, ), pp. –, –, . . J. Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca, ), pp. –; C. Keller, “Das Problem des Bosen in Apocalyptik und Gnostik,” in Gnosis and Gnosticism: Papers Read at the Seventh International Conference on Patristic Studies, ed. M. Krause (Leiden, ); G. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge, England, ). . A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., ), p. . . Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. , p. .

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          ‒   . This argument is made in M. Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature (Albany, ), pp. –. . See Jay’s review of Blumenberg (cited above) pp. –, and Wallace’s argument in “Progress, Secularization, and Modernity: The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate,” New German Critique, no.  (). . L. Dickey, “Blumenberg and Secularization: ‘Self-Assertion’ and the Problem of Self-Realizing Teleology in History,” New German Critique, no.  (), p. . . Luther’s Works (Philadelphia, ), vol. , p. ; vol. , p. . . My discussion here, including citations from Hegel, is based on P. Merklinger, Philosophy, Theology, and Hegel’s Berlin Philosophy of Religion, – (Albany, ), pp. –. . G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley, –), vol. , p. . . Hegel is quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. ; Schelling, Ages of the World, pp. –. . G. W. F. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg, ), p. . . G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York, ), p. . . W. Desmond, “Evil and Dialectic,” in New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. D. Kolb (Albany, ), p. . See also Wallace, The Logic of Hegel, pp. , , ; and Taylor, Hegel, pp. –. . Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. , p. . . Löwith, Meaning in History, pp. , . . Abrams, “Apocalypse: Theme and Variations,” pp. , –. On the notion of the Apocalypse in Hegel, see C. O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, ), pp. –. . K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, cited in Tuveson, “Millenarian Structure of ‘The Communist Manifesto,’” p. . . S. Avineri, “Consciousness and History: List der Vernunft in Hegel and Marx,” in New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. W. Steinkraus (New York, ), pp. –. See also p. . . G. W. F. Hegel, Reinterpretations, Texts, and Commentary, ed. Kaufman (New York, ), pp. –. . Avinieri, “Consciousness and History,” pp. –. See also K. Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New York, ), pp. –; J. Gebhardt, Politik und Eschatology: Studien zur Geschichte der Hegelischen Schule in den Jahren – (Munich, ); S. Na’aman, Emanzipation und Messianismus: Leben und Werke des Moses Hess (Frankfurt, ). . Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p. . . Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. , p. ; Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p. . . K. Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, n.d.), p. . . G. Kitching, Karl Marx and the Philosophy of Praxis (London, ), p. . . A. Cochin, La crise de l’histoire révolutionnaire (Paris, ), p. , quoted in R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, ), p. .



          ‒   . Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. , p. ; Revoliutsiia -gg. na Ukraine, (Kiev, ), vol. , p.; and A. Svirskii, Zapiski rabochego, (MoscowLeningrad, ), pp.-. Marx’s notion of freedom is discussed in detail in A. Walicki, “Karl Marx as a Philosopher of Freedom,” Critical Review. A Journal of Books and Ideas, vol. , (). . Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p. . . This, Norman Cohn tells us, is an old theme. The Reformation prophet Munster, for example, believed that, once liberated from the temptation of Avaritia and Luxuria, the poor will be able to reach a state of indifference toward the goods of this world and “that would qualify them to receive the apocalyptic message.” By contrast, “the property thirsty rich were doomed.” Contrary to the thrust of Cohn’s argument, it seems that in millenarian Christianity poverty was not an end in itself but a means to open the vision of the believer to the true God. Spirituality, not equality, is the key. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, p. . . C. Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx’s Theory of Social Reality (London, ), pp. –; K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York, ), p.  (quote). See also F. Engels, Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Duhring) (Moscow, ), pp. –. . Quoted in Tuveson, “Millenarian Structure of ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ ” p. . . Trotsky’s speech at Copenhagen in November , quoted in J. Maynard, “Personality out of Collectivism,” The Russian Peasant and Other Studies (New York, ), p. . . D. Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, ), p. . . M. Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven, ), p. . Compare N. Cohn, “Medieval Millenarianism,” in S. Thrupp, Millennial Dreams in Action (New York, ); Y. Talmon, “Milennarian Movements,” European Journal of Sociology, no.  (); and the various contributions to Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth? ed. S. Friendlander, G. Holton, L. Marx, and E. Skolnikoff (New York, ). . Augustine cited in Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, p. . For Joachim of Flora, see Bethea, Shape of Apocalypse, p. , also F. Manuel and P. Fritzie, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass., ), pp. , . . Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. –. See also pp. , , , and . For Joachim of Flora’s concept of history and its influence on Hegel and Marx, see E. Daniel, “The Double Procession of the Holy Spirit in Joachim of Flora’s Understanding of History,” Speculum  (). For the Hegelian secularization of the belief that good society can be built on earth, consider C. Butler, “Hegelian Pantheism as Joachimite Christianity,” in Kolb, New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. . Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. . See also H. Levin, “Paradises, Heavenly and Earthly,” Huntington Library Quarterly  (). . C. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, ), p. . . His Anabaptist disciples boasted of their innocence of book-learning and de-

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          ‒   clared it was the unlearned who had been chosen by God to redeem the world. That the Anabaptists rejected all other sources of illumination corroborates my contention that in general the doctrine of salvation through knowledge was based on the belief that the redeeming message was divine and distinct from other forms of knowledge. Likewise, the Marxists preached dialectical materialism as the only true science, dismissing all other bodies of knowledge as distorted and false. . M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., ), p. . See also pp. , and –. See also B. Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to  (Lieden, ); P. Toon, Puritans, the Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology  to  (Cambridge, England, ). . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . Tuveson, “Millenarian Structure of ‘The Communist Manifesto,’” pp. –. . Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, . See also Jay, review of Blumenberg in History and Theory  (), p. . . Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p. . . M. Merleau-Ponty, Aventures de la dialectique (Paris, ), p. . . Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. . . V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, th ed. (Moscow, –; henceforth PSS), vol. , p. .

Chapter 2:The Janus-Faced Messiah . M. Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York, ), p. . See also Wessell, Prometheus Bound, pp. –. . Wessell, Prometheus Bound, p. ; see also L. Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth (Chicago, ). . Groys, Total Art of Stalinism; J. Marcus, “The World Impact of the West: The Mystique and the Sense of Participation in History,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. H. Murray (New York, ), pp. –. . M. Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor, ), pp. –. . Ibid, pp. –, –. . Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. . . A. Lunacharskii, Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia (Moscow, ), p. ; A. Vladimirskii, “Lichnost’ v obshchei tsepi iavlenii,” Put’ prosveshcheniia, no.  (), pp. –; A. Bogdanov, Novyi mir (Moscow, ), p. . For the Marxist quest for the spiritualization of humanity and its transition from physical to spiritual existence, see, for example, N. Torba, “Neravenstvo i nasilie,” Griadushchee, no. – (), p. . . Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. , p. . . Engels cited from L. Feuer, “Marx and Engels as Sociobiologists,” Survey, no. – (–), p. ; Trotsky cited from Y. Cohen, The Penguin Dictionary of

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          ‒   Modern Quotations, d ed. (New York, ), p. ; Plekhanov cited from L. Tikhomirov, Plekhanov i ego druziia: iz lichnykh vospominanii (Leningrad, ), pp. –; Lenin, PSS, vol. , p. . . Marxists rejected syndicalism, considering it one of the variants of primitivism. Syndicalists denied the value of consciousness without which, in Lenin’s view, the gates of salvation could not be opened: “The slave who knows he is a slave has already ceased being a slave.” Hence the Social Democratic dictum: “our strength is measured not by the balance of dead friends to dead foes but by the number of workers we succeeded in making conscious.” The foregoing explains the Marxist rejection of Tolstoy’s call to return to “natural” existence. The Russian Social Democratic press was emphatic that “while the great goal of socialism can be attained only through the growth of consciousness, Tolstoyans foolishly urge the renunciation of culture.” Marxists regretted that “in the footsteps of the Slavophiles, Tolstoy respected in humanity not its aspiration to reach the light but its blind credulity, the obtuse patience planted into the human soul by the crushing labor chores.” See V. Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism (New York, ); S. Schwartz, Lenine et le mouvement syndical (Paris, n.d.); “Mysli sotsial demokrata,” Listki zhizni, no.  (), p. ; “Lev Tolstoi i sotsialdemokratiia,” Iskra, no.  (), pp. –; “Lev Tolstoi,” Golos sotsial-demokrata, no.  (), pp. –; “Sotsial-demokraticheskaia pechat’ ob apostol’stve L. Tolstogo,” Golos sotsial-demokrata, no.  (), pp. –; G. P., “Karl Marks i Lev Tolstoi,” Sotsialdemokrat, no. – (), pp. –; Listki zhizni, no.  (), pp. –. See also E. Lozinskii, Lev Tolstoi ob intelligentsii i rabochem voprose (Moscow, ), p. . . P. Lafarg (Lafargue), “Proletariat umstvennogo i proletariat fizicheskogo truda,” Sochineniia (Moscow-Leningrad, ), vol. , pp. –. . A. Mandel, Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism (Harvard, ), pp. –; K. Marx, “The British Rule in India,” in Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. S. Avineri (New York, ), p. . . Berdiaev, Origins, p. . See also K. Wittfogel, “The Marxist View of Russian Society and Revolution,” World Politics, vol.  (); T. Shanin, “Late Marx and the Russian ‘Periphery of Capitalism,’” Monthly Review  (). . S. Bulgakov, “O zakonomernosti sotsial’nykh iavlenii,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, no.  (), p. . See also S. Bulgakov, “Prostaia rech o mudrenykh veshchakh,” Novoe slovo, June, , p. . . P. Struve, “Moim kritikam,” Materialy k kharakteristike nashego khoziaistvennogo razvitiia (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –; see also P. Struve, Kriticheskie zametki k voprosu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii (St. Peterburg, ), p. ; P. Struve, “My Contacts and Conflicts with Lenin,” Slavonic Review, no. – (), pp. –. . Struve, “Moim kritikam,” p. ; see also S. Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki (Paris, ), p. ; N. Berdiaev, Dream and Reality (New York, ), pp. –, –. . Marx, Grundrisse, pp. , . . A. Syrtsov, “Rabochie fakul’tety,” Permskii rabfakovets, no.  (), p. ; see also L. Sunitsa, “Shkola i proizvodstvo,” Student-rabochii, no. – (), p. . . A. Bogdanov, Padenie velikogo fetishizma (Moscow, ), p. .

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          ‒    . Marx cited from Avineri, “Consciousness and History,” p. . . Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , pp. –; vol. , p. ; vol. , p. . . G. Lagardel’ (H. Lagardelle), “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” Krasnoe znamia, no.  (), p. ; Berdiaev, Dream and Reality, p. . . D. Chetkov, Obshchestvennye klassy (Leningrad, ), p. . . N. Vasil’ev, Desiat’ zapovedei sotsial-demokrata (St. Petersburg, ), p. . See also A. Goffman, “Desiat’ zapovedei” i imushchie klassy (St. Petersburg, ). Lunacharskii cited from J. Scherrer, “La crise de l’intelligentsia marxiste avant : A. V. Lunacharskii et la bogostroitel’stvo,” Revue des études slaves, no.  (); Kollontai quoted from R. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, – (Bloomington, ), p. . . Williams, The Other Bolsheviks, p. ; A. Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm (Moscow-Petrograd, ), p.  (quotes); Gorky cited from “Obrashchenie M. Gor’kogo k trudovoi intelligentsii,” in Intelligentsiia i sovetskaia vlast’: sbornik statei (Moscow, ), p. . Lunacharskii was derided by Lenin as one who had written a new gospel—“The Gospel According to Anatolii.” See Protokoly soveshchaniia razshirennoi redaktsii ‘Proletariiat’ (Moscow, ), pp. –. . Marx quoted from D. Lovell, Marx’s Proletariat: The Making of a Myth (London, ), pp. –; A. Bogdanov, “Sotsializm nauki” (), in Voprosy sotsializma: raboty raznykh let (Moscow, ), p. ; Chetkov, Obshchestvennye klassy, p. ; Chetkov cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii (Moscow, ), p. . . M. Liadov, Voprosy byta (Moscow, ), pp. –; A. Bogdanov, “Nauka i rabochii klass” (), in Voprosy sotsializma, p. ; V. Vorovskii, “Vozniknovenie rabochego klassa” (), in Sochineniia (Moscow, ), vol. , p. . . G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., ), pp. –, ; A. Bogdanov, “Sovremennye idealy” (), in Voprosy sotsializma, p.  (quote). The Proletcult literature reiterated this point. See “Proletarskaia kul’tura,” Griadushchee, no.  (), p. ; N. Kuz’min, “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” Griadushchee, no. – (), p. . . For a discussion of the anxiety of the Russian Social Democrats regarding the paucity of workers in their native country, see D. Geyer, Lenin in der russischen Sotzialdemokratie: Die Arbeitbewegung im Zarenreich als Organisationproblem der revolutionaren Intelligentz, – (Cologne, ), pp. –. . Marxists cited from M. Beloruss, Rabochii i intelligentsiia (Geneva, ), p. ; Iu. Martov, “Kto spaset Rossiiu,” Sotsial-demokrat, no.  (), pp. –. . P. Aksel’rod, “Pis’ma o rabochem dvizhenii,” Vol’noe slovo, no.  (), p. . . A. Angarov, “Klassovaia priroda sovetskogo gosudarstva,” Molodaia gvardiia, no.  (), pp. –. . Wessell, Prometheus Bound, pp. –. . Marx cited from Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , pp. –, –. . S. Vol’skii, Filosofiia bor’by: opyt postroeniia etiki marksizma (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –; Wessell, Prometheus Bound, pp. , , . . Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p. ; the analysis here is drawn from Wessell, Prometheus Bound, p. .

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           ‒   . “Toilers” cited from Krasnyi arkhiv  (), p. ; M. Liadov, Iz zhizni partii (Moscow, ), p. ; M. Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York, ), pp. –. . Löwith, Meaning in History, p. ; L. Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. L. Stepelevich (Cambridge, England, ), p. ; workers cited from Tkach, no.  (), p. . . Wessell, Prometheus Bound, p. ; Latvian workers cited from Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke (Moscow, ), vol. , pt. , pp. –. . Krzhizhanovskii cited from Listovki peterburgskogo “Soiuza bor’by za osvobozhdenie rabochego klassa” (Moscow, ), p. ; G. Iastrebov, Krasnyi bogatyr’ (MoscowLeningrad, ), p. ; Vpered, February ,  (workers’ audience). . Wessell, Prometheus Bound, p. ; Lovell, Marx’s Proletariat, p. . . Chetkov, Obshchestvennye klassy, p. ; Lenin cited from Leninskii sbornik (Moscow, –), vol. , pp. –. . Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm, pp. –; L. Trotskii, Nashi politicheskie zadachi (Geneva, ), p. ; A. Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi nashego vremeni (St. Petersburg, ), p. ; Lovell, Marx’s Proletariat, p. ; Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p. . . Lagardel’, “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” p. ; B. Gorev, “Intelligentsiia kak ekonomicheskaia kategoriia,” Proletarskoe studenchestvo, no. – (), p. ; “O novoi pedagogike i novykh pedagogakh,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. . . M. Reisner, Problemy sotsial’noi psikhologii (Rostov-Don, ), pp. –. See also Lafarg, “Proletariat umstvennogo i proletariat fizicheskogo truda,” pp. –; M. Mandel’shtam, Intelligentsiia kak kategoriia kapitalisticheskogo stroia (Kazan’, ), pp. –; Bogdanov, “Sovremennye idealy,” pp. –; K. Kautskii (Kautsky), Intelligentsiia i proletariat (Odessa, ), p. ; Kuz’min, “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” pp. –. . Bogdanov, “Sotsializm nauki,” p. ; Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm, pp. –. See also ibid., pp. , . For the Marxists’ critique of what they believed to be “the decadent cult of personality typical of the bourgeois intelligentsia,” see Literaturnyi raspad: kriticheskii sbornik (St. Petersburg, ), vol. , pp. –; Vershiny: literaturno-kriticheskii i filosofsko-publitsesticheskii sbornik (St. Petersburg, ). . V. Polonskii, Ukhodiashchaia Rus’: stat’i ob intelligentsii (Moscow, ), p. . See also “Intelligentsiia i kollektivnoe tvorchestvo,” Griadushchaia kul’tura, no. – (), p. ; L. Trotskii, “Ob intelligentsii,” Kievskaia mysl, nos. ,  (), reprinted in Sochineniia, vol. , p. . . Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm, pp. , –. . P. Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod v literaturovedenii (Moscow, ), pp. –. . Lafarg, “Proletariat umstvennogo i proletariat fizicheskogo truda,” p. . . M. Reisner, “Sotsial’naia organizatsiia lichnosti,” Krasnaia nov’, no.  (), pp. –; A. Makarov, “Vospitanie voli i sotsialisticheskaia shkola,” Put’ prosveshcheniia, no.  (), p. ; A. Lunacharskii, Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozreniia (St. Petersburg, ), p. . Vorovskii and Bogdanov maintained not only that proletarian labor does not pre-

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           ‒   clude the development of personality but that it actually, in the words of the former, “teaches the proletarian self-discipline and control over its faculties.” Bazarov, by contrast, was adamant that a sense of individuality, because incompatible with proletarian class unity, will always remain alien to the proletariat. The idea of the merge between the intelligentsia’s sense of self and the proletariat’s sense of collectivism can be traced back to the Russian Populist thought. Already in , the radical publicist Shelgunov wrote: “We, the intelligentsia, are the representatives of individualism; the people are the representatives of collectivism. We represent the personal I; the people represent the social I.” The intelligentsia was supposed to learn from the people about egalitarian brotherhood (the principle represented by the peasant commune) and to teach the people about the liberty of human personality. V. Vorovskii, “Narodno-sotsialisticheskaia partiia i chelovecheskaia lichnost’” (), in Sochineniia, vol. , p. . See also A. Bogdanov, Tektologiia: vseobshchaia organizatsiia nauki (reprint, Moscow, ), vol. , pp. –; and Bogdanov, “Ideal vospitaniia,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no.  (), p. . V. Bazarov, “Avtoritarnaia metafizika i avtonomnaia lichnost’,” in Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozrenniia (St. Petersburg, ), p. . Shelgunov cited from A. Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia: The Mind of Russia,” California Slavic Studies  (), p. . . Vol’skii, Filosofiia bor’by, pp. , –, –, . . Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, pp. –; H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Oxford, ), pp. –. . Kautsky, Intelligentsiia i proletariat, pp. –. See also the discussion on pp. –. . Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, pp. –. . Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm, p. ; Kleinbort cited from B. Kolonitskii, “‘Rabochaia intelligentsia’ v trudakh L. M. Kleinborta,” Intelligentsiia i Rossiiskoe obshchestvo v nachale xx veka (St. Petersburg, ), p. ; A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm (St. Petersburg, ), vol. , pp. , . . J. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, ), pp. –; R. Pipes, “Russian Exigent Intellectuals,” Encounter  (January ), p. ; J. Billington, “The Intelligentsia and the Religion of Humanity,” American Historical Review, no.  (), p. . . V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (New York, ), pp. –; P. Aksel’rod, “Pis’mo k tovarishcham rabochim,” Zadachi rabochei intelligentsii v Rossii (N.P., ), p. ; V. Zorin, Rabochii klass i intelligentsiia (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –; P. Gurevich, Rol’ intelligentsii v sovremennom rabochem dvizhenii (n.p., ), pp. –. See also D. Kol’tsov, “Rabochii i intelligentsiia,” Rabotnik, no. – (), p. . . Kolonitskii, “‘Rabochaia intelligentsiia,’” p. . . M. Aucouturier, “Le problème de l’intelligentsiia chez les publicistes marxistes avant la révolution,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique  (); M. Vandalkovskaia, “K voprosu o soderzhanii poniatiia ‘intelligentsiia’ v literature nachala xx veka,” Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia (Moscow, ). Most Russian Marxists followed Engels’s definition of the intelligentsia as the class of mental laborers; for example, Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, p. . Michael Confino maintains that the “Russian intelligentsia” and the Russian “in-

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           ‒   tellectual stratum” coincided during one generation only, around the s. Confino’s demonstration that the Russian educated elite exhibited little sociological continuity is a powerful challenge to the widespread view that the history of the Russian intelligentsia overlaps with the history of the Russian educated class. Unfortunately, however, Confino interprets the intelligentsia as a sociologically defined social group. His discussion overlooks the fact that the distinction between the intelligentsia (carrier of the universalist, salvational knowledge) and the intellectuals (endowed with a narrow know-how) existed within the revolutionary discourse itself. While incisively refuting the notion that the intelligentsia was sociologically continuous, Confino pours the baby out with the bathwater by ignoring the longevity of the idea of the intelligentsia—an idea that was sustained throughout by the eschatological assumptions of the revolutionary discourse. The point is not that the post-s generations of Russian intellectuals did not live up to the ideal of the intelligentsia, as Confino would have it, but that “the intelligentsia” remained a symbol, a regulative idea that impelled the Russian revolutionary movement. M. Confino, “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Daedalus (spring ). . T. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism (London, ), p. . The following terms are only some of the semantic forerunners of the Marxist “true intelligentsia”: “selfconscious people” (samosoznaiushchii narod) (Aksakov); “the party of enlightenment” (partiia prosveshcheniia) (Sazonov); “thinking proletariat” (mysliashchii proletariat) (Pisarev); “critically thinking personality” (kriticheski mysliashchaia lichnost) (Lavrov). Richard Pipes distinguishes between “cultured intelligentsia” (the intellectuals) and “critical intelligentsia.” (R. Pipes, “The Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia,” in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed. R. Pipes (New York, ), p. . Theodor Shanin refers to “the very transformation of the term ‘intelligentsia’ from ‘value-neutral’ description of individual capacity of intellectual attainment into the synonym of bitter social criticism and moral condemnation.” (T. Shanin, The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century [London, ], vol. , p. .) Isaiah Berlin adds that “the intelligentsia . . . grew to be a dedicated order . . . consumed by a sense of responsibility for their brothers who lived in darkness.” Berlin, The Listener, May , . . Jonas, Gnostic Religion, p. ; see also Rudolf, Gnosis, pp. –. . V. Posse, Teoriia i praktika proletarskogo sotsializma (Geneva, ), pp. –. . G. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, ), vol. , p. ; A. Potresov, Etiudy o russkoi intelligentsii: sbornik statei (St. Petersburg, ), p. ; Trotskii, “Ob intelligentsii,” p. . . P. Lafargue, Sotsializm i intelligentsiia (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –. See also “Professional’naia intelligentsiia i sotsial-demokraty,” Proletarii, no.  (), p. ; V. Polonskii, “Zametki ob intelligentsii,” Krasnaia nov’, no.  (), p. . . K. Clark, “The Image of the Intelligent in Soviet Prose Fiction, –” (PhD. dissertation, Yale University, ), p. . Berdiaev made a similar distinction between filosofskaia istina and intelligentskaia pravda. See Read, Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, p. . . S. Vol’fson, “Intelligentsiia kak sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia kategoriia,” Krasnaia nov’, no.  (). p. ; Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, p. .

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           ‒   . Aksel’rod, “Pis’mo k tovarishcham rabochim,” p. ; Potresov, Etiudy o russkoi intelligentsii, p. . . Struve, “‘Muzhiki’ Chekhova i g. Mikhailovskii,” Novoe slovo (October ), pp. –. The genealogy of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia ascribed to by many historians creates the impression that “the intelligentsia” was a specifically Russian notion that has to be explained in terms of the native tradition of intellectual resistance to the “stifling autocracy.” Such arguments distance Russian Marxism from Western Marxism and talk about a “Russified Marxism,” an heir to the “Russian Populism.” By contrast, I prefer to seek the origins of the notion of the intelligentsia in Western European post-Romantic intellectual currents and not in the supposedly unique features of Russia. I do not deny the affinity between Russian Marxism and Populism. But we should not forget that Populism no less than Marxism was a child of Western Romanticism. The Russian Populism appears more “Russian” than the Russian Marxism for two reason: first, Populism was imported into Russia one generation earlier than Marxism and thus appeared native by the time Marxism became fashionable; and second, having been advocating national revival, Populism passed itself as a “native” phenomenon everywhere, old as the national spirit it supposedly expressed. On the origins of the term “intelligentsia” in Russia, see M. Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” in Pipes, The Russian Intelligentsia; G. Fischer, “The Intelligentsia and Russia,” in The Transformation of Russian Society, ed. C. Black (Cambridge, Mass., ); O. Müller, Intelligentsia: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines politischen Schlagwortes (Frankfurt, ); R. Pipes, “‘Intelligentsia’ from the German ‘Intelligentz’? A Note,” Slavic-Review  (); Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia,” p. . For European Populism and its Russian manifestation, see the work of Franco Venturi: detailed references can be found in A. Gerschenkron, “Franco Venturi on Russian Populism,” American Historical Review, no.  (), pp. –. . “Molitva sotsial-demokrata,” Golos minuvshego, no. – (). . L. Kleinbort, Revoliutsiia i rabochaia kul’tura (Petrograd, ), p. . . Piatakov cited from N. Valentinov, “Piatakov i bolshevizm,” Novyi zhurnal, no.  (), p. . . Lunacharskii, Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia, p. ; Bogdanov, Padenie velikogo fetishizma, p. . Filoramo, History of Gnosticism, p. . . I. Gruenwald, “Knowledge and Vision,” Israel Oriental Studies  (). . H. Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. D. Levin (Berkeley, ), pp. , . In Gnosticism “darkness” is described “principally in physical terms as matter and body (corpse) or psychologically as ignorance or forgetfulness.” The Russian Marxists invested temnota with a similar sense. See also Rudolf, Gnosis, p. . . Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” pp. –. . “Karl Marx i rabochie,” Proletarii, no.  (), p. ; P. Kudeli, “Intelligentsiia i proletarskaia kul’tura,” Griadushchee, no.  (), p. . See also Torskii, “K proletarskoi intelligentsii,” p. . . Lunacharskii, Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia, p.  (the sun); B. Kolonitskii,



           ‒   “‘Marsel’eza’ po-russki: pesni v politicheskoi kul’ture revoliutsii  goda,” Russian Studies  (), p.  (revolutionary songs). For the Proletcult writers, see “Na solnechnyi put’,” Griadushchee, no.  (), pp. –; see also “Kul’tura i prosveshchenie,” Griadushchee, no.  (), p. ; F. Kalinin, “Proletariat i tvorchestvo,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no.  (), p. . Dan, Origins of Bolshevism, p. ; Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm, p. ; M. Gor’kii, “Deti solntsa,” in Sochineniia, vol. , p. . . Kudeli, “Intelligentsiia i proletarskaia kul’tura,” p. . . Alekseev cited from F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution (New York, ), pp. –; Dan, Origins of Bolshevism, pp. –. . The story of Viktor Obnorskii, in this paragraph and the next two paragraphs, is taken from Dan, Origins of Bolshevism, pp. –. The fact that numerous Marxist texts reproduced stories of workers’ ascent to consciousness suggests that we are dealing with a genre that might be called “workers’ lives.” Thus Plekhanov, to give just one other example, described Stepan Khalturin, a member of the Northern Russian Workers Union, as a worker who reached consciousness, someone who “could compete with the intelligentsia with respect to his knowledge and experience.” G. Plekhanov, Russkie rabochie v revoliutsionnom dvizhenii, pp. –. . The hagiographic status of Obnorskii’s “life” was recognized by the Bolsheviks who dedicated an entire book to his memory. V. Levitskii, Viktor Obnorskii: osnovatel’ severnogo soiuza russkikh rabochikh’ (Moscow, ). . F. Samoilov, Vospominaniia ob ivanovo-voznesenskom rabochem dvizhenii – gg (Moscow, ), pp. –. The present deconstruction of the narratives of workers’ identity challenges aspects of Reginald Zelnik’s research. Searching for the pre-Marxist identity of the Russian worker—“before there was any reductive cultural prototype of the radical worker-revolutionary”—Zelnik might be pursuing a mythical subject. It is unclear in what sense a subject could identify itself as a “worker” remaining outside the discursive tissue that privileges labor as a vehicle of emancipation. Nor is it obvious that a historian can peel off the allegedly contaminating “intelligentsia influences” and find at the bottom of the worker’s soul his, so to speak, gut identity. Equally problematic is Zelnik’s reconstruction of the intellectual evolution of the “Russian Bebels” (Bebel was a tuner and thus an “authentic worker” who lived up to the intelligentsia standards and grew to be a Social Democratic leader)—through the autobiographies of the workers Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher. What Zelnik takes to be an idiosyncratic but nevertheless authentic documentation of the growth of the protagonists’ consciousness was in fact a masterful application to individuals of the Marxist eschatological master narrative. None of this, of course, diminishes the value of the study of how Marxist class identities were disseminated in Russia (a theme to the elucidation of which Zelnik has contributed a great deal) and how Marxist notions shaped the minds of the historical subjects, as long as we understand that identities were never somehow real but always already constructed. See R. Zelnik, “Before Class: The Fostering of a Worker Revolutionary—The Construction of His Memoir,” Russian History  (), p. . . Lenin is cited from Lenin ob intelligentsii, ed. S. Girinis and S. Kristov (Moscow,



           ‒   ), pp. –; the first Social Democratic program from KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh (Moscow, ), vol. , p. ; anonymous Marxist pamphleteer from E. P., “Pererozhdenie intelligentsii,” Studencheskaia mysl’, no.  (), p. . . N. Krupskaia, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, ), pp. –; Krupskaia, “Partiia i studenchestvo,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. ; L. Voitlovskii, “Lenin ob intelligentsii,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no.  (), p. . . Examination of the Nietzchean Marxist idea of the intelligentsia has additional, methodological merit: it enables us to move beyond the interpretation of Russian Marxism as a product of a small, educated elite. Only a handful of high-minded Marxist philosophers had the chance to develop and consciously mask their taste for Nietzsche. The far more numerous Marxist users of Nietzschean tropes were blissfully unaware of their intellectual debt. Thus we can adopt a broader view of the wide range of discursive practices through which Russian Marxism transmitted its notions. See G. Kline, “The Nietzschean Marxism of Stanislav Volsky,” in Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature, ed. A. Mlikotin (Los Angeles, ); E. Clowes, The Revolution of Moral Consciousness (De Kalb, Ill., ); B. Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge, England, ). . In this section, which focuses on the gender aspect of Marxist writings, whenever I ascribe a pronoun to “intelligentsia” or the “proletariat,” I abide by the grammar of the Russian original and use “her” (for the intelligentsia) and “his” (for the proletariat). Gender is, of course, less marked in the original passages because Russian is a language where every word has a gender. What I am doing is the equivalent of adding an emphasis. . On violence in the context of gender see T. de Lauretis, “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender,” Semiotica (spring ). . Nikolai Andreevich Gredeskul (–s) was originally from a noble family. He graduated from the Khar’kov university specializing in the philosophy of law and joined the liberal movement in . In  he became a member of the Kadet party. A deputy chairman of the first Duma, he signed the famous Vyborg manifesto. In  Gredeskul left the Kadet organization and after October  moved to the left. His major publications include Sotsial’noe izuchenie prava (); Marksizm i idealizm (); Terror i okhrana (St. Petersburg, ); Proiskhozdenie i razvitie obshchestvennoi zhizni (Leningrad, ). For biographical data, see A. Sack, The Birth of the Russian Democracy (New York, ), p. ; Politicheskie partii Rossii: konets XIX–pervaia tret’ XX veka (Moscow, ), p. . For Gredeskul’s Nietzschean credentials, see M. Agursky, “Nietzschean Roots of Stalinist Culture,” in Rosenthal, Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, p. . . Such pejoratives are dispersed throughout N. Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’ (Moscow-Leningrad, ). Gredeskul was not unique in his belief that the key difference between the proletariat and the intelligentsia was psychological. See, for example, Gorev, “Intelligentsiia kak ekonomicheskaia kategoriia,” p. . . Agursky, “Nietzschean Roots of Stalinist Culture,” p. ; Lunacharskii cited from A. Tait, “Lunacharskii: A ‘Nietzschean Marxist’?” Nietzsche in Russia, p. . See also G. Kleine, “Changing Attitudes Towards the Individual,” in Black, Transformation of Russian Society, p. .



           ‒   . Krasnyi student, no. – (); Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istorikopoliticheskikh dokumentov (henceforth TsGA IPD), f. , op. , d. , l. . Applying to the Party in , Gredeskul expressed his wish “to belong to the Lenin Levy,” that is, to be considered a pure-blood proletarian. TsGA IPD., f. , op. , d. , l. . . These methodological formulations are laid out and defended in Bernice Rosenthal’s “Introduction,” in Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, pp. –. . F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York, ), #, p. . For the roots of the tradition that identified women with the intellect, see I. Couliano, “Feminine Versus Masculine: The Sophia Myth and the Origins of Feminism,” in Struggle of Gods, ed. H. G. Kippenberg (New York, ). The best expression of the other tradition, which regarded the woman as matter alone, was Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, immensely popular in Russia, which identified women with the bodily and the low and men with the spiritual and the elevated. Weininger’s book sold thirty-nine thousand copies in Russia in four translations between  and . E. Naiman, “Historectomies,” Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, ), p. . For the argument that Gredeskul’s contemporaries often articulated cultural hierarchies through gender categories, see A. Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, ), pp. –. . F. Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathushtra,” The Portable Nietzsche (New York, ), p. ; Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York, ), #, p. . . F. Nietzsche, The Birth of the Tragedy and the Case of Wagner (New York, ), p. ; Untimely Meditations (Cambridge, England, ), pp. –; The Gay Science (New York, ), #, p. ; The Will to Power (New York, ), #, p. ; The Gay Science, #, p. ; On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York, ), no. , p. . . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. , . . Ibid., pp.  (Nietzsche),  (intelligentsia). . F. Bulkin (one Marxist), “Rabochaiia samodeiatel’nost’ i rabochaia demagogiia,” Nasha zaria, no.  (), p. ; Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. –. . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. ; J. Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago, ), p.  (noble savage); Vol’skii [Makhaev], Umstvennyi rabochii (Geneva, ), pt. , pp. – (muscles). See also M. M., Intelligentsiia kak kategoriia kapitalisticheskogo stroia (n.p., ), p. ; Zorin, Rabochii klass i intelligentsia, pp. –; Kalinin, “Proletariat i tvorchestvo,” p. . . Polonskii, Ukhodiashchaia Rus’, p. ; Andreev cited from Vol’fson, “Intelligentsiia,” p. ; Gorky cited from M. Louise Loe, “Gorkii and Nietzsche: The Quest for a Russian Superman,” Nietzsche in Russia, p. . . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p.  (quote); Derrida, Spurs, pp. –, ; F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York, ), #, p.  (quote). . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. –; Vol’fson, “Intelligentsiia,” p. . . Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, pp. –; Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. ; Reisner, Problemy sotsial’noi psikhologii, p. . . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. . Rousseau is quoted from L. Hunt,

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           ‒   “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Eroticism and the Body Politics, ed. L. Hunt (Baltimore and London, ), p. ; . E. Lozinskii, Chto takoe, nakonets, intelligentsiia? Kritiko-sotsiologicheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, ), p. ; A. Lunacharskii, Moral’ s marksistskoi tochki zreniia (Sevastopol’, ), p. . . Lenin cited from Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, pp. –; N. Meshcheriakov, “Bez dorogi,” Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia, pp. –; L. Trotskii, Sochineniia (Moscow, ), vol. , p. . . Gredeskul, pp. –; Vol’skii, Filosofiia bor’by, pp. –, see also –. Also see Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, p. ; Lunacharskii, Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia, p. . . Wessell, Prometheus Bound, p. . . This formulation is drawn from Bernice Rosenthal’s introduction to Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, p. . . B. Rosenthal, “Eschatology and the Appeal of Revolution,” California Slavic Studies  (), p. . . Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, pp. –. . Trotsky is cited in Rosenthal, “Eschatology,” p. . Zinoviev’s  speech “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia” is reprinted in V. Soskin, ed., Sud’by russkoi intelligentsii (Novosibirsk, ), p. . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. . . T. de Lauretis, “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender,” Technologies and Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Indiana, ), pp. –. . L. Higgins and B. Silver, “Rereading Rape,” in Rape and Representation (New York, ), pp. –; R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, ), pp. , . . M. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, ), pp. –. . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp.  (Gordian knot),  (rebellion). For a similar comparison of the Revolution to cutting the Gordian knot, see “O novykh nastroeniiakh russkoi intelligentsii,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no.  (), . . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. ; Leninskii sbornik, vol. , p. ; Lunacharskii, Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia, p. . Lunacharskii had the  employees strike in mind. . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. ; Vol’skii, Filosofiia bor’by, pp. , –. . A. Zalkind, “Staraia i novaia intelligentsiia,” Ocherki kul’tury revoliutsionnogo vremeni (Moscow, ), p. ; Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. –; Zinoviev cited from Soskin, Sud’by russkoi intelligentsii, p. ; Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. ; V. Kerzhentsev, “Eshche ob intelligentsii,” in Intelligentsiia i sovetskaia vlast’, p. . . Fond listovok Gosudarstvennoi Publichnoi Biblioteki Im. Saltykova-Shchedrina (St. Petersburg), no. -a. . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. –, . . S. Khan-Magomedov, Pionery sovetskogo dizaina (Moscow, ), p. . . A. Pomorskii, “Proletariat,” Griadushchee, no.  (); A. Gastev, “My rastem

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           ‒   iz zheleza,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no.  (); V. Kirilov, “Zheleznyi messiia,” Griadushchie, no.  (), p. ; B. Verkhoustinskii, “Vulkan,” Trud i tvorchestvo, no.  (); Pomorskii, “Proletariat,” p. ; Gastev, “My rastem iz zheleza,” p. . . F. Zeitlin, “Configuration of Rape in Greek Myth,” in Rape, ed. S. Tomaselli and R. Porter (Oxford ), pp. –. . Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm, p. ; Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. –. . Rosenthal, “Eschatology,” p. ; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. –; Kolonitskii, “‘Rabochaia intelligentsiia,’” p.  (last quote). . Lunacharskii, Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia, pp. , ; Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. . Lissitzky’s poster is reproduced and analyzed in M. Tupistyn, “Superman Imagery in Soviet Photography and Photomontage,” Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, pp. –. Klucis’s poster is in Khan-Magomedov, Pionery sovetskogo dizaina, p. . . Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. , . . Ibid., pp. ,  (Schelling),  (Novalis). . The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York), pp. –, –. . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. , –. . Ibid., pp. , . . L. Wessell, Karl Marx, Romantic Irony, and the Proletariat: The Mythopoetic Origins of Marxism (Baton Rouge, ), p. . . Ibid., p. . . R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, England, ), pp. –. . L. Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Eroticism and the Body Politics, ed. L. Hunt (Baltimore and London, ), p. ; Platonov cited from E. Naiman, “The Case of Chubarov Alley: Collective Rape, Utopian Desire and the Mentality of NEP,” Russian History, no.  (), p. . . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, p. . . Naiman, “The Case of Chubarov Alley,” pp. –. . Gredeskul, Rossiia prezhde i teper’, pp. , . . E. P., “Pererozhdenie intelligentsii,” p. . . Naiman, “The Case of Chubarov Alley,” pp. , . . Ibid., pp. –. . J. F. Lyotard, “La Mainmise” (unpublished paper), pp. , , . A version of this text came out as “The Grip,” in Political Writings (Minneapolis, ), pp. –. . For the Communist Manifesto, see the “Declaration of the Union of Russian Social Democrats,” Rabotnik, no. – (), pp. –; Lyotard, “La Mainmise,” p. . . Lyotard, “La Mainmise,” p. . . Lezhek Kolakowski makes a somewhat similar point in his, “The Myth of Human Self-Identity,” in The Socialist Idea, ed. L. Kolakowski and S. Hampshire, (London, ).

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           ‒   Chapter 3: The “Intelligentsia” . R. Kindersley, The First Russian Revisionists: A Study of “Legal Marxism” in Russia (Oxford, ), p. ; R. Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, – (Cambridge, England, ), pp. –. . P. Struve, Na raznye temy (St. Petersburg, ), p. . For discussion, see C. Read, “New Directions in the Russian Intelligentsia: Idealists and Marxists in the Early Twentieth Century,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, no.  (). . A. Izgoev, “Intelligentsiia kak sotsial’naia gruppa,” Obrazovanie, no.  (), p. . . Although Shuliatnikov was a member of the Social Democratic Party from very early on, he might still be numbered among the Legal Marxists on account of his strong economist leanings. Interestingly enough, the term “shuliatnikovshchina” in the Stalinist period signified crude economic reductionism. Soskin, Sud’by russkoi intelligentsii, p. . . V. Shuliatnikov, Iz teorii i praktiki klassovoi bor’by (Moscow, ), pp. , . . D. Zaitsev, “Marksizm i Makhaevshchina,” Obrazovanie, no.  (), pp. –. Another anonymous Legal Marxist delineated four species of the intelligentsia: members of free professions; graduates of gymnasiums who have no specialized education; students; and “our own workers’ intelligentsia, the ideologists—isolated individuals, existing in all classes and at all times who are driven toward freedom and equality irrespectively of their class background.” See “Vo izbezhanii nedorazumenii,” Rabochaia mysl’, no.  (). . The discussion of Tugan-Baranovskii below is based on: M. Tugan-Baranovskii, “Intelligentsiia i sotsializm,” Intelligentsia v Rossii (St. Petersburg, ), pp. , –, –; see also Tugan-Baranovskii, Teoreticheskie osnovy Marksizma (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –; Tugan-Baranovskii, “Chto takoe obshchestvennyi klass?” Mir bozhii, no.  (), p. . For a contemporary criticism of this position, coming from within the Marxist camp, see V. V. Vorovskii, “Predstavliaet li intelligentsiia obshchestvennyi klass?” in Sochineniia, vol.  (Leningrad, ), pp. –. . Clark, “Image of the Intelligent,” pp. –. . V. Zasulich, “Revoliutsionery iz burzhuaznoi sredy,” Sotsial-demokrat, no.  (), p. ; G. Plekhanov, “Russkii rabochii v revoliutsionnom dvizhenii,” Sotsial-demokrat, no.  (), p. . . The French Marxist Lagardelle (Lagardel’) talked of “the proletariat’s decision to take its fate into its own hands and assign to the intelligentsia not a managing but an auxiliary task.” Lagardel’, “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” pp. , . . P. Aksel’rod, Zadachi rabochei intelligentsii v Rossii (n.p., ), pp. , ; Aksel’rod’s contribution to Die Neue Zeit  (). . Plekhanov cited from L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, ), p. ; Iu. Martov, “Vsegda v menshinstve: o sovremennykh zadachakh russkoi sotsialisticheskoi intelligentsii,” Zaria, no. – (), p. . See also V. Iv-n, “Organizatsionnye zadachi russkogo rabochego dvizheniia,” Rabochee delo, no.  (). . “Ot propagandistkikh kruzhkov k politicheskoi partii,” Iskra, no.  (), p. . . Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, vol. , p. ; Iu. Martov, “Vsegda v

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           ‒   menshinstve,” p.  (see also V. Vorovskii, “K istorii marksizma v rossii” [], in Sochineniia, vol. , p. ); V. Vorovskii, “Sotsial-demokratiia i rabochaia partiia” (), in Sochineniia, vol. , p. . The call “to move from economics to political activity and re-create the Party organization that was decimated in ” appeared even in a journal branded as “economist.” See, for example, “Protest rossiiskikh sotsial-demokratov,” Rabochee delo, no. – (). . Iskra, no.  (), p. . This point is forcefully argued in K. Papaioannou, “Le parti totalitaire,” in De Marx et du Marxisme (Paris, ), pp. –. See also M. Jonstone, “Marx, Engels and the Concept of the Party,” Socialist Register (); J. Conliffe, “Marx, Engels, and the Party,” History of Political Thought, vol. , pt.  (). . Leninskii sbornik (Moscow, –), vol. , pp. –. The Marxist locus classicus can be found in Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p. . Trotskii, Sochineniia, vol. , p. . . The function of defending the concrete expectations of the working class was not unimportant, but this function was assigned to the trade unions. In – Lenin charged the Workers’ Opposition with failing to grasp precisely this division of labor between the Party and the trade unions. See V. Lenin, O profsoiuzakh – gg., ed. A. Troshin and S. Naida (Moscow, ). . A. Besançon, The Rise of the Gulag: Intellectual Origins of Leninism (New York, ), p. . . “Proekt programmy rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi rabochei partii,” Zaria, no.  (), p. ; Iskra, no.  (), p. . . Mayer, Leninism, pp. –. . Aksel’rod, Zadachi rabochei, p. ; and “Pis’ma k tovarishcham rabochim: intelligenty i rabochii v nashei partii,” Iskra, no.  (), p. ; Kol’tsov, “Rabochii i intelligentsiia,” p. . . S. Golub, Cherez plotinu intelligentshchiny: pis’mo rabochego k intelligentam i rabochim nashei partii (n.p., ); Gurevich, Rol’ intelligentsii, p. ; Beloruss, Rabochii i intelligentsiia, pp. , . . Rabochii i intelligenty v nashikh organizatsiiakh (Geneva, ), pp. , ; Bulkin, “Rabochaiia samodeiatel’nost’,” pp. –. . K. Antonov, “Intelligentsiia v Russkom rabochem dvizhenii,” Nasha zaria, no.  (), pp. –. . Nadezhdin, Rabochii i intelligentsia, p. . See also V. Posse, Kakova dolzhna byt’ programma russkikh proletariev (Geneva, ), p. . . “Otkrytoe pis’mo M. Gor’komu,” Bakinskii rabochii, no. – (), pp. –; A. Kleinbort, Ocherki rabochei intelligentsii (St. Petersburg, ), vol. , pp. , . . Chukovski cited from Kolonitskii, “‘Rabochaia intelligentsiia,’” p. ; Iu. Martov, “Iz literatury i zhizni: bunt protiv intelligentsii,” Za rubezhom (December ), pp. –. . This analysis is borrowed from A. Fishzon, “Restoring the Intelligentsia to Order: Russian Liberals Respond to Vekhi, –” (Master’s thesis, Columbia University, ), p. . . Iu. Martov, “Iz literatury i zhizni,” pp. – (quote); Fishzon, “Restoring the Intelligentsia to Order,” p. .

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           ‒   . V. Lenin, “Concerning Vekhi” (), Collected Works, vol.  (Moscow, ), pp. –, cited in Fishzon, “Restoring the Intelligentsia to Order,” pp. –. . Trotskii, “Ob intelligentsii,” p. . . Trotskii, “Intelligentsiia i sotsializm,” p. . . A. Martynov, “Kto likvidiroval ideinoe nasledstvo? Otsenka roli proletariata v russkoi sotsial-demokratii,” Golos sotsial demokrata, no.  (), p. . See also V. V., “Kapitalizm i russkaia intelligentsiia,” Ot semidesiatykh godov k desiatisotnym: sbornik statei (St. Petersburg, ). . Iu. Martov, “Vsegda v menshinstve,” pp. , . . Ibid.; Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, pp. ,  (SDs),  (epochs). . Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, p. ; Kolonitskii, “‘Rabochaia intelligentsiia,’” p. . . Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, pp. –. See also “Intelligentsiia v proshlom, nastoiashchem i budushchem: lektsiia A. Lunacharskogo,” Biulliteni literatury i zhizni, no.  (), p. ; Reisner, Problemy sotsial’noi psikhologii, p. . . “Posle buri,” Golos sotsial demokrata, no. – (), p. . . Zorin, Rabochii klass i intelligentsiia, p. . The post- optimism that Russian Social Democracy came close to the Western European stage of development prompted the Party to translate a series of brochures dedicated to the “intelligentsia”: among them A. Bebel’ (Bebel), Intelligentsiia i sotsializm (St. Petersburg, ); K. Kautskii, Intelligentsiia i proletariat; P. Lui (Louis), Intelligentsiia i sotsializm (St. Petersburg, ); M. Mauernbrekher (Mauenbrecher), Intelligentsiia i sotsial-demokratiia (St. Petersburg, ). . S. Ivanovich, “Sud’by russkoi intelligentsii,” Nasha zariia, no. – (), pp. –; Kleinbort, Ocherki rabochei intelligentsii, p. . See also Aksel’rod, Zadachi rabochei, p. ; Beloruss, Rabochii i intelligentsiia, p. ; Iu. Martov, “Vsegda v menshinstve,” p. ; A. Beranzhe, Intelligentnye proletarii vo Frantsii (St. Petersburg, ); Aksel’rod, “Pis’mo k tovarishcham rabochim,” p. ; Lunacharskii’s preface to S. Livshits, “Partiinaia shkola v Bolon’e (– gg.),” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia  (), p. . . Aksel’rod’s introduction to Rabochii i intelligenty v nashikh organizatsiiakh, p. . . P. Aksel’rod, Narodnaia duma i rabochii s”ezd (St. Petersburg, ), pp. , –. . Adam Ulam, for example, contended in The Bolsheviks (New York, ) that Lenin was imbued with “pathological hatred for the intelligentsia” (p. ). For a recent treatment of the subject, see A. Sevast’ianov, “U istokov: Lenin ob intelligentsii,” Raduga, no.  (). . “Proekt programmy rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi rabochei partii,” Zhizn’, no.  (), p. iii. . Marx and Engels, CW, vol. , p.  (Communist Manifesto); Lenin, What Is to Be Done? pp. , . . Lenin, What Is to Be Done? pp. , , . The Leninist position maintained that “qua ideology, socialism is governed by the general conditions of the genesis [of ideas].” In Russia, the Social Democratic theory emerged “independently of the development the worker’s movement, as a natural and unavoidable result of the develop-

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           ‒   ment of the thinking of revolutionary-socialist intelligentsia.” This is argued in Lenin’s name in Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, pp. , –, as well as in “Revoliutsiia, kul’tura i intelligentsiia,” Krasnyi student, no. – (), p. . . Lenin, What Is to Be Done? p. ; Lenin, “What the Friends of the People Are?” in Collected Works (Moscow, ), vol. , p. ; Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, pp. , . . Berdiaev, Dream and Reality, p. . Keep believes Leninism was a bold affirmation of an elitist approach to politics that was quite novel to Russian Social Democratic thought: “It was plain that, for all his pious obeisances in the direction of Marxist determinism, Lenin was essentially a believer in the limitless opportunities open to the individual.” Rubel accuses Lenin of “Blanquism” and Mayer thinks Lenin espoused a “manipulative theory of history.” Brym claims that “the Bolsheviks, unlike other members of the intelligentsia [were] too integrated in the Russian class structure to be thoroughly westernized. . . . From an early age they were exposed mainly to the offering of Russian culture so that they developed a propensity in their youth to look to Russia’s radical tradition, not Germany’s for a model of political behavior.” Keep, Rise of Social Democracy, p. ; M. Rubel, “The Relationship of Bolshevism to Marxism,” Revolutionary Russia: A Symposium (Cambridge, Mass., ), pp. –; Mayer, Leninism, p. ; Brym, Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism, p. . Most of these scholars were influenced by the Menshevik eagerness to disassociate Lenin from Marxism and to claim the orthodox Marxist mantle for themselves alone. Passing themselves as true internationalists, the Mensheviks and their followers tied Lenin’s politics to the “backwardness” and “insularity” of Russia. Incidentally, Martov was the first to accuse Lenin of Bakunism. See also L. Schapiro, “Marxism in Russia,” in Varieties of Marxism, ed. S. Avineri (The Hague, ). Lenin’s “voluntarism” is frequently explained in terms of the Populist (and thus “backward,” “Asiatic,” and “primitive”) heritage in Russia. See, for example, M. Karpovich, “A Forerunner of Lenin: P. N. Tkachev,” Review of Politics (July ); S. Utechin, “Who Taught Lenin?” Twentieth Century (July ); R. Pipes, “Russian Marxism and Its Populist Background: The Late Nineteenth Century,” Russian Review, no.  (). For a presentation of Leninism against the background of the “Russian national character,” consider N. Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe Ill., ). For the genesis of the Menshevik line of argument vis-à-vis Lenin, see A. Martynov, “Glavnye mementy v istorii russkogo marksizma,” in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX veka” (St. Petersburg, –), vol. , pt. , p. ; L. Martov, Perezhitoe i peredumanoe (Berlin, ), vol. , pp. –. . It is true that the link between Lenin’s theory of imperialism and his assessment of the internal situation in Russia crystallized only during World War I. However, a careful investigation of his earlier texts suggests that he began making such connections much earlier. A. Leontev, O Leninskikh tetradiakh po imperialismu (Moscow, ); E. Vasilevskii, Razvitiie Leninskikh vzgliadov na imperializm (Moscow, ); J. Freymond, Lénine et l’impérialisme (Lausanne, ). . E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London, ), pp. –.

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           ‒   . Ibid. . A. Arato, “The Second International: A Reexamination,” Telos  (), p. . Much of my discussion here is indebted to this essay. . F. Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in L. Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York, ), pp. –. . K. Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (Chicago, ), pp. –; Kautsky, “The Road to Power,” in Socialist Thought, ed. A. Fried (New York, ), pp. –. For Kautsky’s notion of the “social instinct” see his Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History, pp. , ; the Dutch scientist-Marxist, Anton Pannekoek, claimed in the same vein that men are essentially a sophisticated animal. He wrote that the Darwinian theory of evolution was replaced when “man stage” was reached by the Marxist theory of social evolution. A. Pannekoek, Marxism and Darwinism (Chicago, ), pp.–. For a broader examination of the relations between determinism and free agency in Marxism in the s, see L. Colletti, “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International,” in From Rousseau to Lenin (London, ). . Arato, “The Second International,” p. . . Luxemburg predicted that socialism would be characterized by the “reign of free will.” Socialism, she added, “cannot be attained by a mechanical development alone. We must find a spark that will instill consciousness into the masses.” Luxemburg clearly shared the gnostic approach to the Revolution. The metaphor of a “spark,” for example, was Leninist. Elsewhere Luxumburg stated: “Social Democracy—the most advanced, the best conscious detachment of the working class—cannot wait fatalistically for the development of the so-called revolutionary situation. It has to stand ahead of events and try to precipitate them.” Unlike Lenin, Luxemburg saw in the mass strike and not in the Party intelligentsia “the vehicle of proletarian political enlightenment.” Still, for Luxemburg too, truth lay not in expression of workers’ will but in the proximity of their consciousness to the messianic ideal. See, respectively, R. Luksemburg (Luxemburg), Krizis sotsial-demokratii (Moscow, ), p. ; R. Luksemburg, Vseobshchaia zabastovka i nemetskaia sotsial-demokratiia (Petrograd, ), p. ; R. Luxemburg, “Organizational Question of Russian Social Democracy,” in Howard (ed.), Selected Political Writings (New York, ), pp. –; for an overview of Luxemburg’s relation to the theoretical thinking of the Russian Social Democracy, see V. Chistiakov, “Luksemburg i rossiiskaia sotsial-demokratiia v nachale XX veka,” Problemy mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii i osvoboditel’nykh dvizhenii (Moscow, ) and by the same author, “Vlianie russkoi revoliutsii –gg. na razvitie vzgliadov Rozy Liuksemburg,” Ezhegodnik germanskoi istorii.  (Moscow, ). . G. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (London, ), pp. –, –. . Tugan-Baranovskii cited in Arato, “The Second International,” p. . . H. Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York, ), p. . Neil Harding has shown that Lenin’s view of the Party was simply a “restatement of the principles of Russian Marxist orthodoxy,” while his conception of the proletarian con-

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           ‒   sciousness “was no more than a development of Kautsky’s views in the Russian context.” N. Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought (New York, ), vol. , p. . In his study of the German Social Democracy in the first two decades of the twentieth century Carl Schorske argues similarly that the problem of maintaining a revolutionary perspective in times of stagnation was sustained by what he calls “idealist attitude.” The theoretical thinking of the German Social Democracy, in this analysis, appears not that different from the thinking of its Russian counterpart. Be that as it may, it is this book’s argument that the gnostic moment Schorske is pointing toward when he writes of “idealism” in no way contradicted the “materialist philosophy” associated with Marxism. C. Schorske, German Social Democracy, – (Cambridge, MA, ), p.. . Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, p. . . Aksel’rod is quoted from Schwartz, Lenine et le mouvement syndical, p. , and Schwartz from p. . . L. Schapiro, “The Mensheviks,” Russian Studies, p.  (quote); Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, p. . . Potresov, Etiudy o russkoi intelligentsii, pp. , , . . Ibid., p. . For the meaning of the term “kruzhkovshchina,” see L. Haimson, “Introduction,” in The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past, ed. L. Haimson, Z. Galili, and R. Wortman (Cambridge, England, ), as well as Wildman, “Russian Intelligentsia of the s,” pp. –. . Potresov, Etiudy o russkoi intelligentsii, pp. –, . . Lenin quoted in R. Daniels, “Intellectuals and the Russian Revolution,” Slavic Review  (), p. . . Potresov, Etiudy o russkoi intelligentsii, pp. , , . For a rebuttal to Potresov, to the effect that his “intelligentsia-inspired” critique is not the remedy to the problem but just one other manifestation thereof, see “Likvidatsiia gegemonii proletariata v menshevitskoi istorii russkoi revoliutsii,” Proletarii, no. – (), pp. –, and no.  (), pp. –. . Potresov, Etiudy o russkoi intelligentsii, pp. , ; F. Dan, “Zapiski publitsista,” Golos sotsial demokrata, no. – (), p. ; G. Plekhanov, “Rabochii klass i sotsial-demokraticheskaia intelligentsiia,” Iskra, no.  (), p. , and no.  (), p. . See also “Vpered ili nazad: proletarii i intelligenty v russkoi sotsial-demokratii,” Iskra, no.  (), p. ; B. Baluev, “G. V. Plekhanov o roli intelligentsii v russkom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii v kontse xix–nachale xx vekov,” in Plekhanovskie chteniia (Leningrad, ). . Martov cited from “Klass protiv klassa,” Sotsial-demokrat, no.  (); Aksel’rod from A. Ascher, Pavel Aksel’rod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge, Mass., ), p. . . I. Larin, Shirokaia rabochaia partiia i rabochii s”ezd (Moscow, ); G. L., Rabochii s”ezd ili s”ezd rabochei partii (St. Petersburg, ); Piatyi Londonskii s’’ezd RSDRP: ptotokoly (Moscow, ), pp. –. . Iu. Martov, “Proletarii i intelligenty v RSDRP,” Iskra, no.  (), pp. –. . Potresov, Etiudy o russkoi intelligentsii, pp. –. For discussion of this point,

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           ‒   see I. Getzler, “Marxist Revolutionaries and the Dilemma of Power,” in Revolution and Politics in Russia, ed. A. Rabinowitch, J. Rabinowitch, and K. Kristof (Bloomington, ). . Rabochee delo, no.  (), p. . . For Bogdanov as the champion of the anti-authoritarianism he supposedly attributed to Lenin see J. White, “Bogdanov in Tula,” Studies in Soviet Thought , (February, ), pp. –. More generally on the Bogdanov-Lenin controversy see K. Ballestem, “Lenin and Bogdanov,” Studies in Soviet Thought , (); J. Biggard, “Anti-Leninist Bolshevism: The Forward Group in RSDRP,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, no. (); the most comprehensive overview of Bogdanov’s thought is Z. Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, ). For a characteristic Soviet treatment of these issues including the examination of Lenin’s denunciation of “Bogdanovshchina” see L. Suvorov, “Iz istorii bor’by V. I. Lenina, partii bol’shevikov protiv Bogdanovskoi ‘Organizatsionnoi nauki’,” Nauchnye doklady vysshei shkoly (filosofskie nauki), no., (), pp. –. . Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm, vol.  (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –. . Bogdanov, Tektologiia, vol.  (Moscow, ), p. . . Bogdanov, “Ne nado zatemniat,” Ko vsem tovarishcham (Paris, ), pp. –. . “Sotsialdemokraticheskaia vkhozhest’,” Vestnik zhizni, no.  (February, ), p. . Cited in J. Biggart, “Alexander Bogdanov and the Theory of a ‘New Class’,” Russian Review, vol.  (), pp. –. . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi nashego vremeni (Moscow, ), pp. , ; For Bogdanov’s views on proletarian epistemology and its liberating role, see A. Bogdanov, Ocherki filosofii kolektivizma, (St. Petersburg, ), p. ; A. Bogdanov, Padenie velikogo fetishizma (sovremennyi krizis ideologii) (Moscow, ), p. . . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, pp. –. . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, p. ; Bogdanov, Novyi mir. Stat’i, –, (Moscow, ), pp. –; Bogdanov, Revoliutsiia i filosofiia (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –. . Bogdanov, “Proletariat v bor’be za sotsializm,” Vpered, no.  (), p. ; see also Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, pp. –; Bogdanov, “Nauka i rabochii klass,” in Voprosy sotsializma (), p. . . For workers’ propensity to be “culturally backward” see A. Bogdanov, Nauka ob obshchestvennom soznanii (Moscow, ), p. . The point that workers tend to be short on theoretical knowledge by comparison with the intelligentsia is also argued in A. Bogdanov, Nauka ob obshchestvennom soznanii (Moscow, ), p. . . Bogdanov, “Inzhener Meni. Fantasticheskii roman,” reprinted in Voprosy sotsializma, pp. –. . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, pp. –; see also p. . . Bogdanov, “Filosofiia sovremennogo estestvoispytatelia,” Ocherki filosofii kollektivizma (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –. . Protokoly soveshchaniia rasshirennoi redaktsii “Proletariia,” Iiun’  (New York, ), p. . Bogdanov maintained that the entire production process suffers because of the workers shortcomings in the area of theoretical knowledge—see A. Bog-

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           ‒   danov, Mezhdu chelovekom i mashinoi (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –. For Bogdanov’s hope that eventually the working class will acquire knowledge and manage without the tutelage of the intelligentsia see Bogdanov, Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, p. . . Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm, vol.  (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –. . Walicki, “Aleksandr Bogdanov and the Problem of the Socialist Intelligentsia,” Russian Review, vol.  (), p. . . Bogdanov, “Sobiranie cheloveka,” Novyi mir, pp. –. . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, p. . After , the central press organ of Bogdanov’s Proletcult accepted that “the creation of proletarian culture can be assisted by members of other classes.” See also V. Kerzhentsev, “‘Proletkul’t, organizatsiia proletarskoi samodeiatel’nosti,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no.  (), p. . . Bogdanov, “Nauka i rabochii klass,” Voprosy sotsializma, p. . . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, p. . . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, p. ; see also p. ; “Nauka i rabochii klass,” in, Voprosy sotsializma, p. ; F. Kalinin, “Proletariat i tvorchestvo,” p. . . Bogdanov, “Sotsializm v nastoiashchem,” (), in Bogdanov, O proletarskoi kul’ture – (Moscow-Leningrad, ), p. . . Bogdanov, Protokoly, p. . My presentation of Bogdanov’s views here is indebted to the work of John Eric Marot. Marot is absolutely on the mark when he writes that “Bogdanov’s views converged with all pre- Social Democratic theorists in a critical respect: the notion that the spontaneous working class movement was too limited to foster socialist consciousness and that these limitations could be overcome by organizing a Party ‘from the outside’ to bring this consciousness to workers.” In this regard, Marot correctly notes, Bogdanov’s position did not diverge from Lenin’s one inch. However, I find little evidence to corroborate this scholar’s contention that Lenin supposedly later changed his view and converted to workers’ spontaneity. J. Marot, “Alexander Bogdanov, Vpered, and the Role of the Intellectual in the Workers’ Movement,” Russian Review, vol.  (), p. . . Bogdanov, Protokoly, pp. –; see also pp. , , . . Bogdanov, Protokoly, p. . . Bogdanov, “Ne nado zatemniat’,” Ko vsem tovarishcham, pp. –. . Bogdanov, Elementy proletarskoi kul’tury v razvitii rabochego klassa, (Moscow, ), p. . For Bogdanov’s idea of the “new intelligentsia” that would come from the ranks of the working class and produce a comprehensive proletarian knowledge, see A. Bogdanov, Filosofiia zhivogo opyta (Moscow, ), p. . . Lenin is cited in Marot, “Alexander Bogdanov,” p. . . Bogdanov, Iz psikhologii obshchestva (St. Petersburg, ), pp. –. . Sochor, pp. , . For the post-revolutionary debate on the status of “proletarian culture” see J. Biggart, “Bukharin and the Origins of the ‘Proletarian Culture’ Debate,” Soviet Studies, (), no. . For another pertinent formulation by Bogdanov see also A. Bogdanov, “Revoliutsiia i philosophiia,” Obrazovanie, no.  (), p. . . Bogdanov is cited in Sochor, pp. –. . Bogdanov, “Ideal vospitaniia,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no.  (); Bogdanov, “Proletarskii universitet,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no.  (). See also R. Elwood, “Lenin

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           ‒   and the Social-Democratic Schools for Underground Party Workers, -,” Political Science Quarterly, no.  (); J. Scherrer, “Les Ecoles du Parti de Capri et de Bologne,” Cahiers du monde Russe et Sovietique, no.  (). . “Nuzhna li partiinaia shkola,” Sotsial-demokrat, no. , (); V. Polianskii, (editorial), Proletarskaia kul’tura, no.  (), p. . . Bogdanov, Kul’turnye zadachi, p. . . On Makhaev’s anti-intelligentsia stance, see P. Avrich, “What Is ‘Makhaevism’?” Soviet Studies (July ); M. Shatz, “J. W. Machajski [Makhaev]: The Conspiracy of the Intellectuals,” Survey, no.  (); A. D’Agostino, “Intelligentsia Socialism and Workers’ Revolution: The Views of W. Machajski,” International Review of Social History  (). . Quoted from Williams, The Other Bolsheviks, p. . . Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. . . Makhaev is quoted from Rabochaiia revoliutsiia, no. (Moscow, ); the syndicalists statement appeared in M. Svergen, “Puti revoliutsii,” Vol’nyi golos truda, no., (); both citations appear in Biggart, “Alexander Bogdanov” p. . See also L. Syrkin, Makhaevshchina (Moscow-Leningrad, ); Makhaev’s writings have been placed on the Soviet Index Librorum Prohibitorum. . M. Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism (Pittsburgh, ), p. . . For a defense of such thesis, see Alexandre Skirda’s introduction to the French edition of Makhaev’s writings, Le socialisme des intellectuels (Paris, ). Also interesting in this regard is A. D’Agostino, Marxism and the Russian Anarchists (San Francisco, ). . When examined from the point of view of his theoretical method Makhaev, who believed in class analysis, appears for all intents and purposes as a Marxist (with one qualification—Makhaev vacillated between the Populist inclusive definition of the exploited as “all workers and peasants” and the more exclusive Marxist concentration on the “factory and village proletariat”). The syndicalist aspects of Makhaev’s thought are relevant primarily in relation to his politics. A. Vol’skii, Burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia i rabochee delo, (Geneva ) pp. , –. . Vol’skii, Umstvennyi rabochii, pt. , pp. , . . Lozinskii, Chto takoe, nakonets, intelligentsiia? pp. –. Marshal Shatz points out that Lozinskii referred to the intelligentsia as “mental laborers” (umstvennye rabotniki) and not as “mental workers” (umstvennye rabochii) because he felt that “laborers” had less of a proletarian connotation than did “workers.” Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski, p. . . Vol’skii, Umstvennyi rabochii, pt. , p. ; pt. , p. . . Lozinskii, pp. –, , –, –, –, , . . Ivanov-Razumnik, Chto takoe Makhaevshchina? K voprosu ob intelligentsii (St. Petersburg, ). The discussion in the following paragraphs is taken from pp. , –, –, –. Ivanov-Razumnik made the following interesting observation: “Makhaev’s anti-intellectualism and anti-progress spirit is typically intellectual and squares well with Tolstoyanism, for example. For Makhaev, ‘progress’ means ‘regress’ because progress brings hardship to the majority of humanity. Division of labor takes the place of universal equality” (ibid., pp. , ). Here Ivanov-Razumnik shows that

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           ‒   Makhaev was not free from eschatological reasoning. It appears that in Makhaev’s discourse, just as in the discourse of his rivals, history had a clear direction, one that Makhaev charted out using his prophetic insight. What made Makhaev unique was that he claimed that history was presently regressing, instead of advancing. Despite his anti-intellectualism, Makhaev emerged in Ivanov-Razumnik’s astute demonstration as somebody who aspired to occupy a position identical to the one occupied by the intelligentsia in the Socialist Democratic theory. . Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli (St. Petersburg, ), vol. , pp. –. . Ivanov-Razumnik, Chto takoe Makhaevshchina? p. . . Ibid., pp. –. . Kleinbort, Ocherki rabochei intelligentsii, pp. –. . Polonskii, Ukhodiashchaia Rus’, p. ; N. Pokrovskii, “Kaiushchaiasia intelligentsiia,” Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia: Sbornik statei M. Pokrovskogo, N. Meshcheriakova, V. Polonskogo i A. Voronskogo (Moscow, ), p. . Kuz’min, “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” pp. –; Torskii, “K proletarskoi intelligentsii,” pp. –. It is significant, in this context, that Proletcult, a purely proletarian movement, was proud to draw members of the intelligentsia into its ranks. “Intelligentsiia i kollektivnoe tvorchestvo,” p. . . K. Radek, “Intelligentsiia i sovetskaia vlast’,” in Intelligentsiia i sovetskaia vlast’, pp. –; N. Meshcheriakov, “Bez dorogi,” p. . . Zinov’ev, “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia,” in Soskin, Sud’by russkoi intelligentsii, pp. –. See also his Studenchestvo i proletarskaia revoliutsiia (Petrograd, ), p. ; Zalkind, “Staraia i novaia intelligentsiia,” p. . . Sputnik kommunista, no.  (), quoted in Read, Culture and Power, p. . See also S. Fediukin, “Intelligentsiia i beloe dvizhenie (–),” Sovetskaia kul’tura:  let razvitiia (Moscow, ); A. Kvakin, Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia i ideino-politicheskoe razmezhevanie rossiiskoi intelligentsii (Saratov, ). . N. Krylenko, Za piat’ let, – gg. Obvinitel’nye rechi po naibolee krupnym protsessam zaslushannym v moskovskom i verkhovnom revoliutsionnykh tribunalakh (Moscow-Petrograd, ), p. . See also Iakimets, “Koe chto ob intelligentsii,” Studentrabochii  (), pp. , –, . . Clark, “Image of the Intelligent,” pp. vii, –; A. Mazon, Lexique de la guerre et de la révolution en Russie, – (Paris, ), p. ; A. Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi: iz nabliudenii nad russkim iazykom poslednikh let (–) (Moscow, ), p. . . L. Averbakh, “O novykh nastroeniiakh russkoi intelligentsii,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no.  (), p. ; Vol’fson, “Intelligentsiia,” p. . See also Gorev, “Intelligentsiia kak ekonomicheskaia kategoriia,” pp. –. . Meierkhol’d cited from Vestnik rabotnikov iskusstv, no. – (), p. ; S. Ingulov, “Kosovorotka sovetskogo cheloveka,” Zhurnalist, no.  (), p. ; L. Kopelev, I sotvoril sebe kumira (Ann Arbor, ), p. ; Iu. Larin, “Intelligentsiia i burzhuaznyi antisimitizm v SSSR,” Revoliutsiia i kul’tura, no.  (), p.  (Bolsheviks). . N. Ognyov, The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate (New York, ), pp. –.

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           ‒    . Girinis and Kristov, Lenin ob intelligentsii, pp. –. See also Zinov’ev, “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia,” in Soskin, Sud’by russkoi intelligentsii, p. ; “Intelligentsiia i kollektivnoe tvorchestvo,” Griadushchaia kul’tura, no. – (), p. ; Iakimets, “Koe chto ob intelligentsii,” p. ; V. Lenin, KPSS ob intelligentsii (Moscow, ), pp. –. . L. Labedz, “The Structure of the Soviet Intelligentsia,” in Pipes, The Russian Intelligentsia, pp. –. . The earlier term is used in Sotsial-demokrat, no.  (); the latter, in use throughout the s, is examined in R. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the s (Cornell, ). . Bukharin cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, p. ; A. Zalkind, Ocherki kul’tury revoliutsionnogo vremeni, p. . . R., “Sushchnost’ intelligentsii,” Griadushchaia kul’tura, no.  (), p. . . N. Iordanskii, “Obnishchanie intelligentsii,” Vestnik agitatsii i propagandy, no. – (), p. ; N. Meshcheriakov, “Novye vekhi,” Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia: sbornik statei, p. . . “Sotsial’naia fizionomiia intelligentsii,” Biulleteni literatury i zhizni, no.  (), p. . See also L. Averbakh, “K voprosu o komsomol’skoi intelligentsii,” Molodaia gvardiia, no.  (), p. . . A. Lunacharskii, “Intelligentsiia i ee mesto v sotsialisticheskom stroitel’stve,” Revoliutsiia i kul’tura, no.  (), pp. –. See also Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, p. ; Kuz’min, “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” pp. –. . Lunacharskii cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, p. . Lunacharskii, obviously with himself in mind, stated that “as an organ of social consciousness the ideal type intelligent has to become an active socialist.” A. Lunacharskii, Ob intelligentsii (Moscow, ), p. . . V. Kerzhentsev, “Intelligentsiia na perelome,” in Intelligentsiia i sovetskaia vlast’, p. . . “Intelligentsiia v proshlom, nastoiashchem i budushchem: lektsiia A. Lunacharskogo,” Biulleteni literatury i zhizni, no.  (), p. . . “Disput v politekhnicheskom muzee,” pp. –. . For a critique of the ethical definition of the “intelligentsia,” see M. Reisner, “Intelligentsiia, kak predmet izucheniia v plane nauchnoi raboty,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no.  (), p. ; V. Vorovskii, Russkaia intelligentsiia i russkaia literatura (Khar’kov, ), p. . . S. Vol’fson, “Intelligentsiia,” p. ; Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, p. . For Adler, see Polonskii, Ukhodiashchaia Rus’, p. . The anonymous author, “Sotsial’naia fizionomiia intelligentsii,” p. . . Zinov’ev, “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia,” in Soskin, Sud’by russkoi intelligentsii, pp. , ; Chetkov, Obshchestvennye klassy, pp. –. . B. Gorev, “Intelligentsiia kak ekonomicheskaia kategoriia,” Proletarskoe studenchestvo (), no. –, pp. –. . N. Meshcheriakov, “Novye vekhi,” Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia, pp. , ; see also Reisner, “Intelligentsiia, kak predmet izucheniia,” pp. –. . Lunacharskii cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, p. . According to

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           ‒   Lunacharskii, the new intelligentsia was best suited to come from the proletariat, which had proved during the revolution that its consciousness had matured. A. Lunacharskii, “Intelligentsiia i ee mesto v sotsialisticheskom stroitel’stve,” Revoliutsiia i kul’tura, no.  (), p. . Polonskii, Ukhodiashchaia Rus’, p. ; Polonskii, “Zametki ob intelligentsii,” p. ; Solntsev, Obshchevstvennye klassy (), pp. –, . . Sakulin cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, p. . . Vol’fson, “Intelligentsiia,” pp. –, –, . See also F. Engels, Razvitie sotsializma ot utopii k nauke, trans. V. Zasulich (Moscow, ), p. ; M. Rubinshtein, Sotsial’nye korni reformizma (Moscow, ), p. ; Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, p. . . B. Gorev, “Intelligentsiia kak ekonomicheskaia kategoriia,” pp. –, . See also Zalkind, “Staraia i novaia intelligentsiia,” p. ; Reisner, Problemy sotsial’noi psikhologii, pp. , –; “Revoliutsiia, kul’tura i intelligentsiia,” Krasnyi student, no. – (), p. ; “Staraia i novaia intelligentsiia,” Kuznitsa rabfaka, no.  (). . Lunacharskii, Meshchanstvo i individualizm, p. ; Lunacharskii, “Intelligentsiia v ee proshlom” p. . . “Revoliutsiia, kul’tura i intelligentsiia,” p.  (Bolshevik student); Kerzhentsev, “Eshche ob intelligentsii,” pp. –; Kuz’min, “Intelligentsiia i proletariat,” pp. –; Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, pp. –.

Chapter 4: The Making of the New Intelligentsia . Lenin quoted from J. McClelland, “Bolshevik Approaches to Higher Education, –,” Slavic Review  (), p. . . V. Ukraintsev, KPSS—organizator revoliutsionnogo preobrazovaniia vysshei shkoly (Moscow, ), p. ; Partiinyi arkhiv novosibirskoi oblasti (henceforth PANO), f. , op. , d. , ll. –. For the role of the Party cells as leverages of Bolshevik power in the universities in the early s see A. Krasnikova, “Studencheskaia organizatsiia pri Peterburgskom komitete RSDRP(b), i ee vklad v sovetskoe gosudarstvennoe stroitel’stvo v pervye posleoktiabr’skie mesiatsy  goda,” in Problemy gosudarstvennogo stroitel’stva v pervye gody Sovetskoi vlasti (Leningrad, ); Idem, “Pervye kollektivy RKP(b) Petrogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta,” Ocherki po istorii Leningradskogo universiteta (Leningrad, ), vyp.; L. Shilov, “Sozdanie i ukreplenie partiinykh organizatsii vuzov i ikh uchastie v bor’be za politicheskoe zavoevanie vysshei shkoly v pervye gody Sovetskoi vlasti (-), Vestnik LGU. Ser. Istorii, iazyka, literatury, (), no., vyp.; For professorial organizations and their interrelationship with the new regime during the same time period see V. Fortunatov, “Revoliutsionnoe studenchestvo i vuzovskaia intelligentsiia Petrograda-Leningrada v – gg,” Velikii Oktiabr’ i molodezh (Leningrad, ). Idem, “Sektsiia nauchnykh rabotnikov kak provodnik ideinogo vliianiia Kommunisticheskoi partii na staruiu intelligentsiiu (–gg),” Istoricheskii opyt bor’by KPSS protiv burzhuaznoi ideologii, opportunizma i sovremennost’ (Leningrad, ). . S. Fitzpatrick, “The ‘Soft’ Line and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy, –,” Slavic Review  (). . Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi, pp. –.

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           ‒   . Soviet universities were not arenas that invited regional study anyway, since students usually studied far from their native area and frequently moved. The geographical spread of students was an explicit policy on the part of Narkompros. See Ezhenedel’nik narodnogo kommissariata prosveshcheniia, April , . . Only parties that were legalized under the Bolshevik rule could compete for student confidence. Sbornik dekretov i postanovlenii raboche-krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva po narodnomu obrazovaniiu (henceforth SU), vol.  (Moscow, ), pp. –. . Ukraintsev, KPSS, pp. , ; E. Brusnikin, “Iz istorii bor’by kommunisticheskoi partii za vuzovskuiu intelligentsiiu v –,” Voprosy istorii KPSS  (), pp. –. . J. McClelland, “Bolshevik Approaches to Higher Education,” p. . See also T. Til’, “Sotsial-demokraticheskoe dvizhenie molodezhi -kh godov,” Pamiat’, no.  (), p. ; In  student councils secured wide student support for electors’ mandates (nakazy) of a clearly liberal bent. They demanded revision of the new constitution, abolition of the discrimination against class aliens, and political freedom. Ukraintsev, KPSS, pp. –; S. Zhaba, Petrogradskoe studenchestvo v bor’be za svobodnuiu vysshuiu shkolu (Paris, ), p. ; A. Leikin, Protiv lozhnykh druzei molodezhi: iz istorii bor’by KPSS s burzhuaznymi i melkoburzhuaznymi partiiami za molodezh, – (Moscow, ), pp. –, –. . Fediukin, Velikii oktiabr’ i intelligentsiia, p. ; See also Ukraintsev, KPSS, pp. –. For student life in Petrograd during the Civil War see, Severnaia kommuna, August , November , , January  and  as well as February , ; Krasnaia gazeta, February , September , October , . . P. Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary (New York, n.d.), p. . . S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, - (Cambridge, ), p. ; Leikin, Protiv lozhnykh druzei molodezhi, p. ; Ukraintsev, KPSS, pp. –; Brusnikin, p. . . Lunacharskii cited from N. Bukhbinder, “Studencheskaia organizatsiia pri Petrogradskom kommitete R.S.D. R.P. (Bolshevikov),” Krasnaia letopis’ (), p. ; G. Zinov’ev, Studenchestvo i proletarskaia revoliutsiia (Petrograd, ), p. . . A. Lunacharskii, “Rol’ rabochikh fakul’tetov,” Vestnik rabochikh fakul’tetov, no.  (), p. ; Pokrovskii, “Kak u nas nachalas’ proletarizatsiia vysshei shkoly,” Pravda, September , ; L. Livshits, “Rabfaki i vysshaia shkola,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. . . Biulleten’ glavprofobra, no.  (), p. ; Biulleten’ (NKP), no. , December , ; N. Vikhirev, “Politicheskaia istoriia rabfakov,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), pp. –; “Istoricheskii ocherk Leningradskikh rabochikh fakul’tetov,” in Itogi i perespektivy rabochikh fakul’tetov (Leningrad, ); Piat’ let Leninskoi ucheby: iubileinyi sbornik (–) (Leningrad, ); K. Wiedenfeld, The Remaking of Russia (London, ), p. . For the history of workers’ faculties in Leningrad and Tomsk, see Petrol, “Rabochie fakul’tety Leningrada v bor’be za osushchestvlenie Leninskogo plana sozdaniia sotsialisticheskoi intelligentsii,” Vestnik LGU, no.  (); N. Taskaev and I. Pospelov, “Sozdanie i razvitie rabochikh fakul’tetov v Sibiri (–),” Partiinye organizatsii zapadnoi Sibiri v period stroitel’stva sotsializma i kommunizma (Kamerovo, ), pp. –.

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           ‒   . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; See the exploration of Soviet legislation on higher education in Voprosy narodnogo prosveshcheniia v osnovnykh direktivakh s”ezdov, konferentsii, soveshchanii TsK i TsIK VKP(b) (Moscow, ), pp. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., d. , l. ; —d. , ll. – (quote); —d. , l. . . SU, no.  (), p. . For opposing perspectives on the new decree, see V. Iakovleva, “Organizatsiia vysshei shkoly,” in Vysshaia shkola v RSFSR i novoe studenchestvo (Moscow, ), pp. –; M. Novikov, “Moskovsii universitet v pervyi period Bol’shevitskogo rezhima,” in Moskovskii universitet, –: iubileinyi sbornik (Paris, ), p. . . A. Kupaigorodskaia, Vysshaia shkola Leningrada v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti, – (Leningrad, ), p. ; Ukraintsev, KPSS, p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , ll. , . . Lenin, PSS, vol. , p. . . Pravda, October , ; V. Fortunatov, “Sistema partiinogo rukovodstva vuzami v Petrograde-Leningrade v vosstanovitel’nyi period (–),” in Voprosy razvitiia sotsialisticheskoi kul’tury (Leningrad, ), p. . . In  a group of prominent oppositionist professors were expelled from the Soviet Union. The head of the Russian Emigré Student Center, M. Fedorov, estimated that during the early s about twenty thousand students followed them into emigration. “Otchet o deiatel’nosti tsentral’nogo komiteta po obespecheniiu vysshego obrazovaniia russkomu iunoshestvu za granitsei’ za tri goda ego sushchestvovaniia,” Bakhmeteff Archive, Fedorov collection, box ; Novikov collection, box , ll. –, ; —box , ll. –; M. Heller, “Premier avertissement: un coup de fouet. L’histoire de l’expulsion des personalites culturelles hors l’Union Sovietique en ,” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique, vol., (). . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. , ; —d. , l. . . K. Bolotnikova, “Agitatsionno-propagandistskaia rabota partiinykh organizatsii Sibiri sredi intelligentsii posle razgroma kolchakovshchiny,” in Iz istorii sovetskoi intelligentsii (Novosibirsk, ), p. ; V. Soskin, “Vysshaia shkola sibiri v nachale kh godov,” in Sibir’ v period stroitel’stva sotsializma i perekhoda k kommunizmu (Novosibirsk, ), p. ; N. Taskaev, “Partiino-politicheskaia rabota iacheek RKP(b) Tomskikh vuzov v –,” in Doklady -i nauchnoi konferentsii kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk Tomskogo politekhnicheskogo In-ta (Tomsk, ), p. ; V. Mindolin, “Vuzy Sibiri posle razgroma kolchakovshchiny,” in Bakhrushchinskie chteniia (Novosibirsk, ), p. . . Ugarov, Chetyre goda Tomskogo rabfaka (Tomsk, ), p. . On the term “workers’ faculty student” (rabfakovets), see Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi, pp. –. For professorial resentment of the Bolshevik proletarianization, see I. Got’e, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e (Princeton, ), p. ; M. Novikov, Ot Moskvy do Niu Iorka (New York, ), p. . . R. Markova memoirs, Na shturm nauki (Leningrad, ), pp. –, –. For similar stories see “God organizatsionnoi raboty studenchestva rabfaka,” Studentrabochii, no.  (), p. ; Golos studenta, no.  (), p. . . Zhaba, Petrogradskoe studenchestvo, pp. –. . M. Korbut, “K voprosu ob”edinenii mezhdu rabfakoutsami i osnovnikami,”

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           ‒   Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. ; See also “Posle iubileinye mysli,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. . . L. Kniazeva, “Slovo ‘boloto’ kak semanticheskoe zaimstvovanie: k otgranicheniiu polisemii i omonimii v politicheskoi terminologii,” Problemy leksigraficheskogo analiza proizvedenii V. I. Lenina (Moscow, ), pp. –. . A. Leikin, “Iz istorii bor’by za preodalenie vliianiia melkoburzhuaznykh partii na studenchestvo, –,” in Intelligentsiia i sotsialisticheskaia kul’turnaia revoliutsiia (Leningrad, ), p. ; R. Markova memoirs, Na shturm nauki, p. . . Sverdlovets, no.  (), pp. , . . R. Markova memoirs, Na shturm nauki, p. ; For the semantics of student behavior, see also Ia. Nazarenko memoirs, in ibid, p. ; P. Ageev, “Nekotorye itogi raboty rabfakov,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. ; “Smychka vyshei shkoly s proletariatom,” Petrogradskaia pravda, October , ; Gorn, “Obshchestvennopoliticheskaia deiatel’nost’ Permskikh rabfakovtsev za tri goda,” Permskii rabfakovets, no.  (), pp. –; M. Raisner, “Staroe i novoe,” Krasnaia nov’, no.  (); Iu. Fausek, “Molodezh,” Novaia rossiia, no.  (). . K. Griuneval’d, “Vospominaniia belopodkladochnika,” Pamiati russkogo studenchestva kontsa XIX nachala XX vekov: sbornik vospominanii (Paris, ), pp. , . See also Gorn, “Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia deiatel’nost’,” pp. –; N. Slepnev, “Rabfaki i vuzy: v chuzhoi sem’e,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), p. ; S. Solunova memoirs, Na shturm nauki, p. ; Leikin, Protiv lozhnykh druzei molodezhi, p. ; Al’fa, “Kriticheskaia nastorozhennost’,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. ; “Den’ revoliutsionnogo studenchestva,” Leningradskaia pravda, February , ; A. Shliakhman, “Studencheskie organizatsii v epokhu diktatury proletariata,” Proletarskoe studenchestvo, no.  (), p. ; Loshchikov, “God raboty: iz vospominanii,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. . . Martinsen memoirs, Na shturm nauki, pp. –; P. Spazheva memoirs, Na shturm nauki, pp. –. See also Student, no.  (), p. , and Semenov, “Odno iz zavoevanii rabochikh,” Golos rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. . . M., “Bezpartiinyi rabfakovets,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. ; Student Grisel’bar, “Godovshchina rabfaka P. P. un-ta,” Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. ; S. Soldatenkov memoirs, Na shturm nauki, p. ; A. Zalkind, “Raboche krest’ianskaia molodezh i vysshaia shkola,” Proletarskoe studenchestvo, no.  (), p. ; P. Kalugina, “K pobede,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. . . Zhaba, Petrogradskoe studenchestvo, p. . . M. Korbut, “Posle-iubileinye mysli,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. . . Martinsen memoirs, Nas shturm nauki, p. ; Permskii rabfakovets’, no.  () p. ; Grekov, “Zadachi udarnika rabfakovtsa,” Golos rabfakovtsa, no.  (), pp. –. . G. Ustinov, “Gadermausy,” Petrogradskaia pravda, March , . . Pokrovskii cited from Vil’korskii, “Puteiskaia liagushka: golos molodykh studentov,” Krasnyi student, no. – (), pp. –. See also Zhaba, Petrogradskoe studenchestvo, pp. –; V. Ivanchikov, “Smena: k geneologii russkogo studenchestva,” Proletarskoe studenchestvo, no.  (), p. . . “Doloi ‘Tat’ianu,’” Student-rabochii, no. – (), p. . See also “Chetyre

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           ‒   iubileia,” Rabfakovets’, no.  (), pp. –; Novoe studenchestvo, February ; M. Novikov, “Moskovskii universitet v pervyi period Bol’shevitskogo rezhima,” p. ; G. Mednikov, “Dva praznika,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), p. ; Kuznetsy griadushchego, no.  (), p. ; N. Krupskaia, “Den’ proletarskogo studenchestva v Moskve,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. . For the celebration of Tatianin Den’ as late as  (with the Bolsheviks Semashko and Kamenev in attendance!) see Bakhmeteff Archive, Novikov collection, box , l. . . A. Shenkman, “Proletarii v vuze. Pesnia na motiv: ‘kak rodnaia menia mat’ provozhala,’” in Itogi i perespektivy rabochikh fakul’tetov, p. . . A. Potopaev, “Na rabfake,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. . . V. Bonnell, “The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art,” Making the Workers Soviet (Ithaca, ), pp. –; Soskin, “Vyshaia shkola,” p.  (one student). . S. Gurin, “Rabfak,” Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. . . F. Chudinov, “Student-rabochii,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. . . Mushcheroi, “Ko -oi godovshchine rabfaka v samare,” Golos studenta, no.  (), pp. –. For additional examples of the motif of accession to light, see V. Ekhov, Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. ; Grezov, “Na rabfake,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. . . E. Vikhirev, “Um,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (–), p. . When combined with labor, knowledge is praised also in F. Chudinov, “Poet-samouchka,” Studentrabochii, no.  (), p. . . G. Vinokur, Kul’tura iazyka (Moscow, ), pp. –. . For a similar emphasis on the advent of the Bolshevization of Russia following the introduction of NEP, see R. Pethybridge, “Concern for Bolshevik Ideological Predominance at the Start of NEP,” Russian Review  () and K. Clark, “The ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Soviet Intellectual Life,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinovich, and Stites, Russia in the Era of NEP. . Shvedov, “Vyvody iz priemnoi kompanii na rabfaki i s rabfakov v vuzy,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. – (), pp. –. . N. Krupskaia, “Klassovyi priem i reorganizatsiia vuzov,” Leningradskaia pravda, April , . See also the discussion in Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (), p. . . M. Liadov cited from “Zadachi universiteta i uroven’ prepodavaniia,” in Zapiski kommunisticheskogo universiteta imeni Sverdlova, vol.  (Moscow, ), pp. , . . Gessen cited from M. Liadov, “O zadachakh i perespektivakh kommunisticheskogo universiteta im. Ia. M. Sverdloava,” ibid., p. –. . “Studenty Sverdlovskogo universiteta o reorganizatsii komvuzov,” ibid, pp. –. . Shvedov, “Na chto nado obratit’ vnimanie rabfakam v – uchebnom godu,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), p. . . W. Goode, ed., School Teachers and Scholars in Soviet Russia (London, ), p. ; F. Tandler, The Workers’ Faculty (Rabfak) System in the USSR (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, ), pp. –; Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (henceforth TsGA SPb.), f. , op. , d. , l. ; Izvestia VTsIK, no.  (); Obraztsov, “Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd rabfakov,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), p. .

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           ‒   . Obraztsov, “Rabochii fakul’tety i ikh uchebno-organizatsionnoe razvitie,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), p. ; R. Sosnovskaia, “K voprosu o prieme na rabfaki v – godu,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), pp. –. . See E. Zarnitsyn, “K voprosy o normal’nosti seti rabochikh fakul’tetov,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), p. ; Narkompros, –oktiabr’ : kratkii otchet (Moscow, ), pp. –; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. ; —d. , l. ; —d. , ll. –. . Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Novosibirskoi oblasti (henceforth GANO), f. , op. , d. , l. . According to the first workers’ faculty statute, in case some vacancies in the workers’ faculties remained, nonmanual laborers could fill them. In – some  percent of workers’ faculty students nationwide were nonmanual workers. This embarrassingly high percentage was justified by the Party membership of these students, which made them “proletarians in consciousness.” (Additional provisions were made so that service in the Party compensated for insufficient work experience.) Measures were soon taken to curtail their enrollment, however, and by the middle of the decade the share of mental laborers in the workers’ faculties became negligible ( percent in ). Tandler, The Workers’ Faculty, p. ; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Shvedov, “Itogi iv vserossiiskogo s”ezda rabfakov,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), p. ; N. Vikhirev, “Budushchnost’ rabfakov v obshchei sisteme narodnogo obrazovaniia” in Itogi i perespektivy rabochikh fakul’tetov, p. ; Shnir, “Rabfak i vuz,” Krasnoe studenchestvo (), pp. –; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . D. Konchalovskii, Vospominania i pis’ma: ot gumanizma k Krestu (Paris, n.d.), p. , letters from November ,  (quote), and July , ; Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. ; GANO, f. , op. , d. . . Vestnik kollektiva VKP(b) i kul’tsoveta VUZ goroda Kazani, April , , pp. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; see also Istoriia Leningradskogo universiteta, – (Leningrad, ), p. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. , ; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ; Biulliten’ narkomprosa, no.  (), p. . A “toiling peasant” needed a certificate from the village executive committee and a letter from the county Party cell specifying his social position; a “worker” needed a certificate from the factory committee; an “employee” needed one from the local soviet committee or the trade union. TsGAORL(L), op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . Ibid., ll. . In , a group of Petrograd State University professsors protested before the local soviet: “We believe that level of knowledge rather than class or political criteria should be the basis of enrollment.” Ibid., l. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; see also —f. , op. , d. , l. .



           ‒   . S. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley, ); J. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago, ). . V. Nevskii, Otchet raboche-krest’ianskogo kommunisticheskogo universiteta imeni Ia. M. Sverdlova (Moscow, ), p. . . In October , . percent of the students were “members of other parties.” The category “members of other parties” remained in some Narkompros statistical compilations from the s, but the category was invariably empty. Members of nonBolshevik parties were excluded from the student body. Nevskii, Otchet, p. . . Nevskii, pp. –. . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –; Partiinyi arkhiv tomskoi oblasti (henceforth PATO), f. , op. , d. , l.. Compare with S. Del’tov, “Student s ‘pogreshnostiami’,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), pp. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . See also N. Poletika, Vidennoe i perezhitoe: iz vospominanii (Jerusalem, ), pp. –. . The issue of statistical regularity was never fully resolved in the s. In , for example, the Leningrad Medical Institute’s admissions commission complained that various institutions—such as the Party, trade unions, the People’s Education Department, and Narkompros—unjustifiably complicated its work by each demanding its own statistical methods to be followed in reporting the admissions data. TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. , , –. . P. Dimov, Proletarizatsiia sovetskoi shkoly: k istorii rabochego fakul’teta Irkutskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta (Irkutsk, ), pp. , ; Statisticheskii biulleten’ sibkraistatotdela, no. – (), p. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. , . . P., “Tri goda,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no.  (), pp. –. . P. E., “Priem ‘Novobrantsev,’” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), pp. –. . GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , ll. –. . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Istoriia sovetskoi konstitutsii v dokumentakh (Moscow, ), pp. –; A. Dobkin, “Lishentsy: –,” Zven’ia, vol.  (Moscow, ); E. Kimerling, “Civil Rights and Social Policy in Soviet Russia, –,” Russian Review  (). . Poletika, Vidennoe i perezhitoe, p. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l.  ; GANO, f. , op. , d. , l.  (Moshchitskii). . During the s the numbers of disenfranchised in Siberia grew. Whereas in  about . percent of the Siberian urban population were deprived of voting rights, by  their share had grown to . percent. S. Krasil’nikov, “Politika sotsial’noi diskriminatsii v otnoshenii intelligentsii v e gody,” Intelligentsiia v sovetskom obshchestve (Kemerovo, ), p. .



           ‒   . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l.  (Iakovlev); GANO, f. R-, op. , d.  (Gedalii Leonovich as artisan); —d. , l.  (Gedalii Leonovich as merchant); —d. , l.  (schoolteacher). . PATO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –; GANO, d. , l. . . GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . Two additional examples of the supplications of disenfranchised student applicants may be adduced. Posokhin, who was turned down by Tomsk Technological Institute as a “son of a former merchant,” echoed Busygin’s plea. “It is absolutely true that my father worked as a shop assistant in Makugin’s bookstore,” he wrote. “Due to his energy and the experience he had accumulated, father later launched a book business of his own. In the pre-revolutionary order there was no governmental organization trading in books so that this field was open to private initiative. Since after the revolution my father worked in soviet institutions there are no grounds to consider my father, let alone me, a socially alien element.” GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . . M. Vrednyi, “Nazoilivaia mukha,” in Ucheba i pesni: iubileinyi sbornik k desiatiletiiu rabfakov (Omsk, ). . “K chitske rabfakov,” Proletarskoe studenchestvo, no.  (), pp. –; N. Suslin, “O zhizni Khar’kovskikh vuzov,” Krasnaia molodezh, no.  (), p. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. –. See also Istoriia Leningradskogo universiteta, p. ; P. Ageev, “Itogi chistki,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), pp. –; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Pravda, May , ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . For a comprehensive treatment of the checkup in Leningrad, albeit a treatment informed by a different methodology than the one employed here, see P. Konecny, “Chaos on Campus: The  Student Proverka in Leningrad,” Europa-Asia Studies  (). . PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. , ; for additional details, see TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Obraztsov, “Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd rabfakov,” pp. , –; see also TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , ll. , . . Fitzpatrick, Education p. . . Ibid., p. ; “Chistka i leninskii prizyv,” Oktiabr’ mysli, no. – (), p. . . Fitzpatrick, Education, pp. –. . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Fitzpatrick, Education, pp. –. . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; see also GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , l. ; PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l.  (quote); Irkutskii gosudarstvennyi universitet



           ‒   im. A. A. Zhdanova (Irkutsk, ), p. ; Irkutskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, khronika sobytii (Irkutsk, ), p. ; GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. ;—d. , l. . . PATO, f. , op. , d. , ll. , ; GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . A.Lunacharskii, “Studenchestvo i novaia ekonomicheskaia politika,” Proletarskoe studenchestvo, (), no., pp.-; Such tripartite divisions of the student body became obligatory. The Party cell at the Leningrad State University, for example, reported shortly before the  purge that the local student body consisted of: “() workers’ faculty students and peasant elements combined with some of the employees and working intelligentsia—the Soviet kernel; () children of artisans, clergy, merchants and part of the highly qualified dignitaries (vysokokvalifitsirovannaia znat’)”; () children of experts, children of high-rank employees and toiling intelligentsia—the swamp. TsGIA IPD, f., op., d., l.. Having applied similar principles of categorization, the Leningrad Agricultural Institute’s Party cell found among the student body in the mid-s: “() Communists and non-Party students who follow the leadership of the Party; () the counterrevolutionaries”; and, () “philistine intelligentsia students whose main desire is to assert their individual uniqueness by shunning any party affiliation.” TsGIA IPD, f., op., d., l.; A related survey carried out in Petrograd in  is interesting in so far as it included more explicit and detailed specification of the “political moods” of the various student groups. “We have in the city universities: () workers, Komsomol and Party members [whose mood is positive]; () old student cadres —clerks and bureaucrats who spend their last days in the university. Their mood: typical of the intelligentsia growling and grumbling and constant dissatisfaction with the Soviet Power; and finally, () petit-bourgeois, philistine students. Their mood: a utilitarian adaptation to Soviet Power, support of Landmarks” (Landmarks being a stream in the Russian intelligentsia that accepted the Bolshevik regime). Such language and tone is more frequent in GPU reports on the political moods of the population—the famous “special summaries” (spetssvodki). B. Tovarovskii, “Uchet nashikh nastroenii,” Krasnyi student, no., (), p. . The same tripartite breakdown of the student body prevailed in Siberia. According to Tomsk Technological Institute the opponents of the Soviet Power among the local students were “children of capitalists (otpryski kapitalistov), big intelligentsia (bol’shaia intelligentsiia), clergy, and wealthy elements.” The swamp was populated by “urban dwellers (meshchane)” and traders (torgashi) who declare that ‘we do not care who is in power.’” The good students were “workers and peasants, petty clerks and toiling intelligentsia.” The use of pejoratives in the characterization of non-proletarian students should not go unnoticed. “Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia studenchestva Tomskogo Tekhnologicheskogo Instituta, (-), Tomskii tekhnologicheskii universitet za  let svoego sushchestvovaniia (Tomsk, ), p.. . A. Khozail, “O bezpartiinosti v vyshei shkole,” Krasnyi student (), pp. –; see also B. Tovarovskii, “Uchet nashikh nastroenii,” Krasnyi student, no.  (), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ;—d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . The instructions by the Central Committee of the Party denied local Party or-

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           ‒   ganization the right to appoint the GPU personnel, making it the sole prerogative of the center. Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, no.  (Moscow, ), p. ; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , l. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . The first academic purges in Siberia were carried out immediately after the establishment of Red rule in the East. In a circular from February , , the Siberian Party bureau expressed the desire “to show that speculators and counter-revolutionaries have no place in our universities.” Shortly thereafter, the Siberian Revolutionary Committee formed special troikas (including representatives from GPU, the Party, and Narkompros) that conducted the first university purge. The purge of students who fought in White units was resumed in  to the satisfaction of the Omsk Party provincial committee, which boasted that “it provoked panic among the alien elements”; fifty-eight students were purged from the Tomsk State University and ninety-seven from the Tomsk Technological Institute, “including officers and volunteers of the White Army, anti-Soviet militants, and children of speculators and idle elements.” See also GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; Izvestiia Sibirskogo biuro TsK RKP(b), no. – (), p. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . Ibid. . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . The rate of the purge in the Tomsk State University was very close to the one in the Tomsk Technological Institute though the Tomsk State University’s class composition was “vastly inferior.” From a total of , students in the Tomsk State University,  were purged (. percent);  ( percent) for academic reasons and  (. percent) for sociopolitical reasons. GANO, f. , op. , d. , op. , d. ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –; PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , l. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. –; —f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , ll. –; —d. , l. .

Chapter 5: Classes Made and Unmade . N. Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in SixteenthCentury France (Stanford, ), pp. –. . I. Berlin, “L. B. Namier, a Personal Impression,” Encounter (November ), p. . . D. Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review  (), pp. –; R. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in ImageMusic-Text: Roland Barthes, ed. S. Heath (London, ). . Marx cited from Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. , p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. – (), p. ; “Chistka vuzov,” Volia rossii, no. – (), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l.  (Leningrad); GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. – (Omsk); PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. – (Tomsk).



           ‒    . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –; PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. – (Siberia); TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. – (Leningrad). . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l.  (Omsk); V. Shapko, “Lenin o lichnom primere kommunista v vypolnenii obshchestvennogo dolga,” Voprosy istorii KPSS, no.  (), p.  (Lenin); SU, no. , December , , p.  (Sovnarkom). See also Maynard, “Personality out of Collectivism,” p. . . Solonikin’s denunciation is in GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , ll. –; —d. , l. ; —d. , ll. –; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. , ; —d. , l. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. , . . Volia rossii, no. – (), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., f. , op. , d. , ll.  (Sergeev’s father), – (Berelevich). . Ibid., f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., f. , op. , d. , ll. , , , –. . Ibid., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., d. , ll. , , . . “Proverka v vuzakh: rektorskoe soveshchanie,” Leningradskaia pravda, May , . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., d. , l. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. , . . GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . . S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York, ), pp. –. . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., ll. , . . Ibid., d. , ll. , –. . Ibid., d. , l. . . Ibid., d. , l. . . Ibid., l. ; —d. , ll. , . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Izvestiia Sibirskogo biuro TsK RKP(b), no. – (), p. ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , ll. –; GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . Shumikhin was among those purged from Tomsk Technological Institute at GPU’s behest. He was described as “an anti-Soviet element who took an active part in toppling the Soviet power in Tomsk in , on which occasion he lost an eye.” Charged with participating in the anti-Soviet uprising, the supplicant adhered to the narrative of his accusers, but assigned himself an opposite role in this narrative. Shumikhin denied the accuracy of the GPU report that he



           ‒   lost his eye on the day of the anti-Bolshevik coup. Instead, he claimed to have suffered the wound on June , , almost three weeks after the Bolsheviks lost control of Tomsk, the implication being that he must have been injured while resisting the counterrevolution, already in control of Tomsk, and not while participating in its antiBolshevik actions. According to Shumikhin this was how he got wounded: “While I was in a Tomsk office, the post office guard, the combatant Getsen, aimed a gun at a certain Kazantseva who stood nearby talking to him. Inadvertently, Getsen released a bullet. As a result Kazantseva was killed outright and my eye was injured by a fraction of the bullet.” What was interesting beyond all the information Shumikhin volunteered was the subtext of his story. The significant detail noted by Shumikhin was that the Menshevik committee was actually entrusted with the defense of the military warehouse from where the weapon of the above-mentioned post office guard, Getsen, was taken. “I promptly sued the Mensheviks for damages but they retreated, declaring that there was no Menshevik organization in Tomsk at all—a false claim that Kolchak’s court fully endorsed.” Shumikhin’s narrative placed the Mensheviks and Kolchak on one side of the revolutionary barricade and himself on the other. Since these were the Mensheviks—the power that stood behind the White uprising in Tomsk, while being abetted by the reactionary camp—who caused his injury, how could anyone say he supported them in ?! Should the Mensheviks, who already escaped justice once, be absolved again, while the good Bolshevik, Shumikhin, was victimized again!? Seemingly inadvertently, Shumikhin noted in conclusion the full address of the Menshevik headquarters: “the former ‘Post Street’ (Pochtamtskaia ulitsa), house No. , where a little sign, ‘The Tomsk committee of the Social Democratic party (Mensheviks)’, was glaring. At present this street is renamed after Lenin.” The tour in the streets of Tomsk came to form an associative chain in the reader’s mind linking the rehabilitation of the supplicant’s political past with the rehabilitation of the street that was turned from a Menshevik site into a street honored with the name of the leader of the proletariat. Rechristened to bear Lenin’s name, the street was presented as a place of a personal memory, testimony to the suffering of a rank-and-file Bolshevik. GANO, f., op., d., l.. . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. , –, . . GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi, p. . . The Russian proverb literally reads “like a cut-off slice of bread” (kak otrezannyi lomot’). GANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., d. , l. . . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Fitzpatrick, Education, p. . . N. Gorin, “Soveshchanie rektorov VUZov pri Glavprofobre,” Student-rabochii, no.  (), p. ; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., d. , l. .

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           ‒   . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid., ll. –. . Ibid., ll. –, –. . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . GANO, f. , op. , , ll. , , , ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . “Sokrashchenie vuzov,” Leningradskaia pravda, May , ; Kupaigorodskaia, Vysshaia shkola Leningrada, p.  . V. Tan-Bogoraz, “Staraia i novaia derevnia,” Rossiia, no.  (). . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . See A. Vyshinskii, “Rol’ rabfakov v dele proletarizatsii vyshii shkoly,”  Let stroitel’stva rabfakov (Moscow-Leningrad, ), p. ; I. Ryzhkov, “Rezul’taty priema v vuzy RSFSR,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), p. . . M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (Evanston, ), pp. –, –. . A. Rykov, “Kul’turnye potrebnosti strany i zadachi vuzov,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. – (), l. ; GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l.  (quote). . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ; I. Khodorovskii, “Sostoianie vuzov v RSFSR (Doklad v zasedanii sovnarkoma ot  Fevralia  goda),” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), p.  (quotes). . Tan-Borogaz is cited in Tandler, The Workers’ Faculty, p. ; M. Gorkii, “On the Russian Peasantry,” Journal of Peasant Studies  (October ), p. ; Shvedov, “Itogi iv vserossiiskogo s”ezda rabfakov,” pp. –. See also A. Kondrat’ev, “Itogi priema na rabfaki v  gody,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), pp. –; Kasatkin, “O prieme v vuzy v  godu,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. – (), p. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Khodorovskii, “Itogi priema v vuzy i na rabfaki RSFSR v  godu i osnovnye nachala priema  goda,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (), pp. – (quote); “Tovarishch Lunacharskii o rabfakakh,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (), p. ; “O rabfakakh,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (), pp. –; Kondrat’ev, “Itogi priema na rabfaki,” p.  (quote); Samarin, “O prieme na rabfaki,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), p. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ; GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. . . N. Vikhirev, “Itogi priema na rabfaki v  godu,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. – (), p. . . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; Smolensk Archive , –. . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l.  (quote). See also TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. , , , ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Biulleten’ narkomprosa, no. , April , ; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Kasatkin, “Bol’noe mesto vuzovskoi raboty,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. 



           ‒   (), pp. –; GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , l. ; Fitzpatrick, Education, p. ; Shvedov, “Vyvody iz priemnoi,” p.  (quote); Leonidov, “Itogi priema v gorodskie vuzy,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (), p.  (quote); PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l.  (quote for ); Abinder, “Priem v Vuzy RSFSR v  godu,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.  (), pp. –; A. Kondrat’ev, “K itogam vypusknoi proverki znanii na rabfakakh v – uchebnom godu,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), pp. –; Khodorovskii, “Itogi priema v vuzy i na rabfaki RSFSR,” p. ; TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. . . Applicants who claimed to be numbered with the “toiling intelligentsia” had to produce a certificate from the local municipal committee (mestkom). SU, no.  (); Ezhenedel’nik Narkomprosa RSFSR,  (); TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ;— d. , l. . . PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. . See also TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , ll. –. . Sovetskaia sibir, July , . . GANO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. ; PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. ;—f. , op. , d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , l. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. –, , . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid. In  the board of administration in Leningrad State University was staffed by thirty-one Communists, comprising about  percent of its size. After the board was reelected at the beginning of the – academic year, the share of Communists increased to  percent. TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . For a discussion of these matters, see V. Fortunatov, “Bor’ba Petrogradskikh bol’shevikov za rukovodiashchie organy vuzov v – gg.,” Istoriia KPSS: nauchnye doklady. XXX gertsenovskie chteniia (Leningrad, ), pp. –. . V. Memnonov, “Priem v vuzy sibiri v  godu,” Prosveshchenie sibiri, no.  (), pp. –; PANO, f. , op. , d. , ll. , –, ; PATO, f. , op. , d. , ll. –; —f. , op. , d. , ll. , –, ; —d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , ll. , ; —d. , l. ; GANO, f. R-, op. , d. , ll. –, , ; —d. , ll. –. . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; PANO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. . . TsGA SPb., f. , op. , d. , ll. –; TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . A unique set of data released by the Leningrad Forestry Institute permits us to evaluate the proletarianization bias in the decisions of the local admissions commissions. From the  admissions statistics, among the workers who applied,  percent were accepted although only  percent passed the entrance exams; among the peasants,  percent were accepted although only  percent passed the exams; among the employees,  percent were accepted although  percent passed the exams. The rate of class discrimination in the institute—which we may define here as the deviation from the observance of the pure academic criteria and admission of all applicants who passed entrance exams—revolved around  percent. Of course, the overall bias in

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           ‒   favor of the working class was actually much higher; valuable as it is, the data does not take into account the proletarian workers’ faculty graduates who enrolled without being examined (about  percent). See TsGAOR(L), f. , op. , d. , l. . . Khodorovskii, “Itogi priema v vuzy i na rabfaki RSFSR,” pp. –. . A. Lunacharskii, “Sostoianie narodnogo prosveshcheniia v RSFSR,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no.  (), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . A. Kamenskii, “Vuzy i promyshlennost’,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no. – (–), p. ; Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. – (), p. . See also Fitzpatrick, Education, p. . . Naslednikam revoliutsii: dokumenty partii o komsomole i molodezhi (Moscow, ), p. . . PATO, f. , op. , d. , l. ; —d. , l. . . Fitzpatrick, Education, p. . . See the recent work on the subject by researchers working in post-Soviet Russia: A. Krivoruchko, “Sotsial’naia politika v period NEPa,” Problemy sotsial’noi politiki i obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli v Rossii i SSSR: Iz istorii sotsial’noi politiki i sotsial’no politicheskoi mysli SSSR, (Moscow, ); V. Mau, Reformy i dogmy, -, (Moscow, ), A. Tsakunov, V labirinte doktriny. Iz opyta razrabotki ekonomicheskogo kursa strany v -e gody, (Moscow, ); V. Nikulin, Vlast’ i obshchestvo v -e gody. Politicheskii rezhim v period NEPa. Stanovlenie i funktsionirovanie (-), (St. Petersburg, ).

Chapter 6: Proletarianization Contested . In the s many anti-Bolshevik political activists—dispersed and depleted in numbers, either underground or in exile—lost clear-cut party affiliation. Rather than tracing down the politico-intellectual development of every individual (in any case an impossible task since many of the articles and proclamations examined below were anonymous), I focus on the political identity of the periodical cited, assuming that the editorial boards introduced a degree of unity into the opinions they published. The Menshevik position is gleaned from Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik and Zaria—two key Menshevik emigré organs during the s. The Socialist Revolutionaries voiced their opinions in the revived Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (editors: Chernov, Rusanov, Shreider), Volia Rossii (editors: Lebedev, Stalinskii, Slonim, Sukhomlin), Sovremennye Zapiski (editors: Avksent’ev, Bunakov, Vishniak, Rudnev) as well as in the daily Den’ (editors: Kerenskii, Zenzinov). The newspapers Poslednie Novosti and Rul’ were taken to exemplify the s Kadet press. The political identification of the oppositionist leaflets spread during the  purge is either more simple or more difficult to ascertain, depending on whether the leaflets ascription to this or that party organization is directly indicated or avoided. In the latter case the content of the text becomes the sole criterion to establish the political orientation of those who composed the leaflet in question. . C. Timberlake, ed., Essays on Russian Liberalism (Columbia, ), p. .

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           ‒   . F. Dan, “Desiat’ let revoliutsii,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. – (), pp. –, –. Eschatological time reckoning was at the center of the Menshevik attention in the s. The Mensheviks were reportedly asking themselves, How long is the NEP stage going to last? In which direction is NEP developing? See, for example, “Nash put’,” Golos rabochego, no.  (), p. . The Bolsheviks had similar eschatological concerns. Lenin conceded in an interview with the Spanish Communists in December  that “forty to fifty years will pass before classless society is constructed.” (This was said before NEP was announced—an important indication that the “transitional period” was a general Marxist concept, irreducible to the “Russian s.”) Later on in the decade the question of how long the Party had to wait before classless society was constructed became a highly charged topic in Bolshevik intra-Party struggles. Speaking at the Fifteenth Party Conference (December ), Trotsky stated that “no less than thirty to fifty years will pass before we reach Communism.” Although Trotsky was merely repeating Lenin’s prognostication, Stalin interpreted Trotsky’s estimate as “revolutionary defeatism.” On the seventh Komintern plenum (November–December ), Stalin ridiculed another of Trotsky’s contentions, namely that “it will take about a hundred years until the socialist economy will prove its superiority over the capitalist one.” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no.  (), p. ; Piatnadtsataia konferentsiia VKP(b), no.  (Moscow, ), pp. , ; Na fronte istoricheskoi nauki (Leningrad, ), p. . . Leikin, “Iz istorii bor’by za preodalenie vliianiia melkoburzhuaznykh partii na studenchestvo, –,” Intelligentsiia i sotsialisticheskaia kul’turnaia revolutsiia, (Leningrad, ), pp. , -; N. Trifonov, “Konets Melkoburzhuaznykh Partii Menshevikov i Eserov”, Uchenye zapiski LGU. Seriia istoricheskikh nauk, no. , p. . . Istoriia Leningradskogo universiteta, pp.–; T. Til’, “Sotsial-demokraticheskoe dvizhenie molodezhi -kh godov,” Pamiat’, no., pp. –; V. Dvinov, Ot legal’nosti k podpol’iu, (Stanford, ), pp., . . Leikin, “Iz istorii bor’by,” pp. –. . “Leningradskoe studenchestvo v novom uchebnom godu,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. K-, op. , d. , l. . See also K. L., “Zavoevannie vuzov,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. – (), p. ; S. Zagorskii, “Novaia Rossiia i zadacha rabochego klassa,” Zaria, no.  (), p. ; S. Wolin, “The Mensheviks Under NEP and in Emigration,” in The Mensheviks: From the Revolution of  to the Second World War, ed. L. Haimson (Chicago, ), pp. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; see also Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. – (), p. . . “Chistka universiteta,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . “Leningrad: protsess sledovatelei—uchashchaiasia molodezh,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. – (), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. K-, op. , d. , l. . . Iu. Ferdman, “Sotsial’naia osnova bol’shevizma,” Zaria, no.  (), p. ; see also Dvinov, Ot legal’nosti k podpol’iu, p. .



           ‒   . TsGA IPD, f. K-, op. , d. , l. . . S. Ivanovich, VKP: desiat’ let kommunisticheskoi monopolii (Paris, ), p. ; V. Brovkin, “The Mensheviks and NEP Society in Russia,” Russian History, no.  (), p. . . Bakhmeteff Archive, B. Sapir collection, box , “Letters from Soviet Russia,” folder , s. . “Kiev. Studenchestvo antisimitizm, chasnaia torgovlia, intelligentsiia,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. ; “Kiev. Akademicheskaia zhizn’ pri nepe,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p.  (Mensheviks); Leningradskaia pravda, June ,  (Bolsheviks); TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . “V vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenniiakh,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. ; “Leningradskoe studenchestvo v novom uchebnom godu,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . Bakhmeteff Archive, B. Sapir collection, box , “Zagranichnaia delegatsiia RSFSR; Socialist Youth International,” folder , –. . J. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, ), p. . The attribution of a social (and psychological) sense to “democracy” was not the exclusive legacy of the left. The French right-wing psychologist Le-Bonn, whose writings were current in Russia before the revolution, described “democracy” as “beastly, herd-like throng.” To Le-Bonn, “democracy” connoted a social group of sorts— the “mob.” G. Lebon (Le-Bonn), Psikhologiia sotsializma (St. Petersburg, ). . Ste. Croix explains that in antiquity “democracy,” the rule of the “demos,” had two meanings: either the whole citizenry or, alternatively, the poor and the lower classes. Since the majority of citizens everywhere owned little or no property, the propertied class complained that “demokratia” was the rule of the demos in the narrower sense and in effect the domination of the poor over the rich. Aristotle, according to Ste. Croix, brushed aside what nineteenth-century liberals would have thought was the most important criteria for the classification of political regimes, difference of number, stating that voting results were purely accidental, outcome of the obvious fact that the rich happen to be few and the poor many. The real basis, according to Aristotle, had to be social class: “what makes an oligarchia is the rule of the rich (rather than the few), and what makes a demokratia is the rule of the poor (rather than the many). Number is accidental, and not an essential attribute: but the accidental generally accompanies the essential. . . . Demokratia might be defined as the constitution under which the poor, being also many in number, are in control.” Aristotle maintained that the real ground of the difference between “demokratia” and “oligarchia” was poverty and wealth, and he went on to explain that he would have continued to speak in terms of “oligarchia” and “demokratia” in the same way even if the rich were many and the poor few—a nonsensical usage from the liberal point of view. Demokratia was therefore government by the poor, and the poor were expected by Aristotle to desire demokratia. Aristotle, Politics, b; see also G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Cornell, ), pp. –, .



           ‒   . Iu. Martov, “Liberal’nyi sotsializm,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), pp. –, quoted in J. Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, – (New York, ), pp. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l.  (leaflet); S. Volin, Mensheviki v pervye gody NEPa (New York, ), p.  (conference); Sotsial-demokrat, no.  (), p. , quoted in Brovkin, “Mensheviks and NEP Society,” p.  (political vision). . “Moskva: Chistka vuzov,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. ; “Moskva: K chistke vuzov,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . “Kiev. Akademicheskaia zhizn’ pri nepe,” Sotsial-demokrat, no.  (), p. ; “Tashkent: ‘Chistka’ universiteta,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p.  (Colloquium); “Moskva: v vyshikh uchebnykh zavedeniiakh,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  () (Internationale). . “Moskva: Chistka vuzov,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . S. Bel’skii, “Vse zdes’,” Znamia rabfakovtsa, no. – (), p. . See also V. Sh-rin, “Chistiat,” Krasnaia molodezh, no.  (), pp. –. . K. L., “Zavoevanie vuzov,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. – (), p. . . “Kiev. Peregestratsiia studentov,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p.  (lawyers); “Kiev. Studenchestvo, antisimitizm,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no,  (), p.  (Kiev); Poletika, Vidennoe i perezhitoe, pp. –. . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . Ibid., ll. – (leaflet); Bakhmeteff Archive, Sapir collection, box , “Letters from Soviet Russia,” folder , s (Central Committee). . TsGA IPD, f. K-, op. , d. , l. . . Golos sotsial demokrata, no.  (); Brovkin, “Mensheviks and NEP Society,” p. . . “V vysshikh uchebnykh zavedeniiakh,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . Dan is cited in P. Garvi, “Likvidatsiia diktatury i zadachi Sotsial Demokratii,” in Problemy revoliutsii: diskussionnyi sbornik, ed. F. Dan (Berlin, ), pp. –. See also pp. –. . S. Solunova memoirs, Na shturm nauki, p. ; Leikin, Protiv lozhnykh druzei molodezhi, p. ; Leikin, “Iz istorii bor’by,” p.  ( quote); “Sotsial-demokraticheskoe” p.  (quote); a  communiqué of the “Zagranichnaia delegatsiia PSR,” in The Socialist-Revolutionary Party After October : Documents from the P. S.-R. Archives, ed. Marc Jansen (Amsterdam, ), pp. –. . Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no.  (), pp. –, –. See also E. Zil’berberg, “Puti i zadachi nashei molodezhi,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no. – (), pp. –; Obraz budushchego v russkoi sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi mysli kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka (Moscow, ), p. . . “Intelligentskoe primirenchestvo i bol’shevizm” (editorial), Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no. – (), p. . See also G. Baian, “Intelligentsiia i narod,” Krest’ianskoe delo, no. – (), pp. –.



           ‒   . A. Peshekhonov, “Narodnyi sotsializm ili proletarskii?” Russkoe bogatstvo, no.  (). . “Chistka vuzov,” Volia rossii, no. – (), p.  (eyewitness report); “Bez smeny” (editorial), Dni, no.  () (émigré daily). See also V. Surovtsev, “Evoliutsioniruiut li bol’sheviki?” Volia rossii, no.  (). . G. Shreider, “Novaia bol’shevitskaia nauka,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no.  (), p.  (crypt); “Internatsional’naia studencheskaia konferentsiia v niurenberge – Avgusta s.g.,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no.  () p.  (graduating); E. I. S., “Studencheskaia zhizn’,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no. – (), p.  (Soviet Power); V. Chernov, “Bol’shevizm i uchashchiesia,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no.  (), p. . . Volia rossii, no. – (), p. . . Student, “K Prizyvu ‘stremleniia,’” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no.  (), p.  (barometer); L., “Pis’mo iz Moskvy: Peterburgskim studentam,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no. – (), pp. – (student body). . Volia rossii, no. – (). A similar sentiment from the Socialist Revolutionary Studencheskii vestnik is quoted in Leikin, Protiv lozhnykh druzei molodezhy, p. . . V. Sukhomlin, “Sotsializm i svoboda,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no.  (), p. ; L., “Pis’mo iz Moskvy,” pp. –. . Zhaba, Petrogradskoe studenchestvo, pp. , . . “Rabochii klass i kommunisty,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no. – (), pp. –. . Volia rossii, no. – (), p. . . “Rabochii klass i kommunisty,” pp. – (clings to them); L., “Pis’mo iz Moskvy,” pp. – (spongers); Zil’berberg, “Puti i zadachi nashei molodezhi,” pp. – (might). . All quotes in this paragraph are from I. Kheraskov, “Demokratiia i sovremennost’,” Sovremennye zapiski, no.  (), pp. –. The primacy of the social aspect in the SR definition of “democracy” surfaced when Kheraskov added: “workers criticize the Soviet state not qua ‘democratic’ but qua ‘bourgeois.’” Vishniak also used “socialist democracy” and “the democracy of the propertyless” interchangeably, and Baian took issue with “intelligentsia formalism” regarding “democracy.” M. Vishniak, “Na rodine,” Sovremennye zapiski, no.  (), p. ; Baian, “Intelligentsiia i narod,” p. . At first reading, it may appear that at least one anonymous SR expounded the formal interpretation of “democracy,” claiming that “socialism without freedom is worse than autocracy without socialism.” But later on, the same author complained that Bolshevism is against the “freedom of labor” (svoboda truda), and that “the lessons of Bolshevism proved to be deadly to tens of millions of workers and peasants.” This clearly indicates that he was primarily concerned with the political liberties of the toiling classes. S. I. R., “Sotsializm ili svoboda,” Volia rossii, no.  (). . L., “Pis’mo iz Moskvy,” pp. – (quote); see also M. Osorgin, “O studenchestve,” Dni, December , . . “Vybory pravleniia v Moskovskii politekhnicheskii institut,” Volia rossii, no.  ().



           ‒   . All quotes in this paragraph from L., “Pis’mo iz Moskvy,” pp. –. . Zil’berberg, “Puti i zadachi nashei molodezhi,” pp. –. The SR émigré editorials were proud that SR students were expelled for propaganda among workers. “Vysylka studentov,” Dni, November , ; “K trudiashcheisia molodezhi vsekh stran,” Revoliutsionnaia rossiia, no. – (), p. . . “Intelligentskoe primirenchestvo i bol’shevizm,” p. . . N. R. (anonymous SR), “Studenchestvo pod nadzorom,” Volia rossii, no.  (); Volia rossii, no. – (), p.  (student rooms). . S. Maslov, “Vozrozhdenie rossii i krest’ianstvo,” Krest’ianskaia rossiia, no. – (), pp. –. See also B. Chernov, “Gorod i derevniia,” Nuzhdy derevni, no. – (), p. ; Baian, “Intelligentsiia i narod,” p. . . While it is true that some right-wing Mensheviks advocated a violent overthrow of the Bolshevik regime, the Menshevik leader Martov castigated them as “dissenters in their own party.” Insisting that the Soviet regime was socialist (even if socialism in a distorted form), Martov opposed radical measures. G. Aronson, “K peresmotru nashei platformy,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (); L. Martov, “Otvet kritikam,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), pp. –; P. Axelrod, Observations sur la tactique des socialistes dans la lutte contre le Bolshevisme: Extraits d’une lettre à Martov (Paris, ). On the radical SR opposition to the Bolshevik regime, see V. Chernov, “Istoriia PSR,” in Jansen, Socialist-Revolutionary Party After October , pp. –. . P. Mikhailov, Politicheskie partii i ikh vzaimootnosheniia s proletariatom,” Volna. Ezhemesiachnyi organ federatsii anarkho-kommunisticheskikh grupp, no., (), pp.-. For an overview of post- Anarchist doctrines, see P. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, ), pp. –; A. Zevelev, ed., Istoriia politicheskikh partii rossii (Moscow, ), pp. –. Contemporary analysis can be found in “Bolshevizm in Anarkho-Kommunizm,” Volna, no. – (); M. S. V., “Anarkhisty i sotsialisty,” Volna, no.  (); A. Korelin, “Manifest Anarkhistov Kommunistov,” Volna, no.  (); A. Cherkov, “K voprosu o partii anarkhistov-kommunistov,” Delo truda, no.  (); G. Askarov, “Voprosy anarkhizma-universalizma,” Universal, no. – (); Organizatsionnaia platforma vseobshchego soiuza anarkhistov (Paris, ), Lichnost’ i obshchestvo v anarkhistskom mirovozzrenii (Petrograd and Moscow, ). Since my goal here is to show what united the Anarchist approach to Bolshevism, rather than the internal divisions within the Anarchist camp, I do not emphasize these differences below. The following key to some of the Anarchist publications might be useful: supporters of economic dictatorship expressed their views in Rabochii put’; supporters of AnarchoSyndicalism wrote in Anarkhicheskii vestnik and Golos truda; champions of political dictatorship wrote primarily in Pochin, Nabat, and Anarchicheskii vestnik; and Volna tried to become tribune to more than one stream in the Anarchist movement. . Leikin, “Iz istorii bor’by,” p. ; Vestnik agitatsii i propagandy, no. – (), p.  (Bolshevik CC); Anarkhicheskii vestnik, no.  (), pp. –. . P. A., “Bol’shevizm pered sudom mirovogo proletariata,” Anarkhicheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. ; “Sovremennoe polozhenie v rossii,” Anarkhicheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. ; “Otnoshenie bol’shevikov k anarkhistam,” Volna, no. – (), p. .



           ‒   See also G. Maksimov, Za chto i kak bol’sheviki izgnali anarkhistov iz Rossii (Shchetin, ), pp. –. . Osvobozhdenie profsoiuzov, no.  (), p.  (Comrade workers); Pochin, no.  (), p.  (arena); “Stachechnoe dvizhenie v Rossii,” Osvobozhdenie profsoiuzov, no.  (), p.  (stench). . Cherkov, “K voprosu o partii anarkhistov-kommunistov,” p.  (inverted commas); Volna, no.  (), p.  (drill); “Bolshevizm i Anarkho-Kommunizm,” Volna, no. – (), p. . . Bezvlastnik, “Nuzhen-li perekhodnyi period,” Volna, no.  (), p.  (absurdity); “Sovety,” Volna, no.  (), pp. – (quotes). . Avtonomov, “Intelligentsia i rabochii,” Volna, no.  (), pp. – (safe haven); N. Lazarevich, “Nasha tsel’,” Osvobozhdenie profsoiuzov, no.  (), p.  (despotism); G. Maksimov, “Sotsializm, Anarkhizm i Russkaia Revoliutsiia,” Volna, no.  (), pp. – (scorn); Allenov, “Rabochie i intelligentsiia,” Svobodnoe obshchestvo, no.  (), p.  (hands off). . Osvobozhdenie profsoiuzov, no.  (), p. ; Vol’naia zhizn’, no. – (), pp. –; “K XI-oi godovshchine oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii,” Osvobozhdenie profsoiuzov, no.  (), p. ; Klich anarkhista, no.  (), p. . . Osvobozhdenie profsoiuzov, no.  (), p.  (professors); A. Gorelik, Anarkhisty v rossiiskoi revoliutsii (Argentina, ), pp. – (account). . Trud i volia, no.  (); Vol’nyi golos truda, no.  (); Vol’nyi trud, no. – (), p. ; Volna, no.  (), pp. –; —no.  (), p. ; “Do svidaniia,” Volna, no.  (); —no.  (), p. ; A. Andreev, Neonigilizm (Moscow, ), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; B. Gorev, “Apoliticheskie i antiparlamentarskie gruppy,” Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX veka” (St. Petersburg, –), vol. , p.  (quotes). . Volna, no.  (), p. ; —no.  (), pp. – (freedom); —no.  (), pp. – (equality); —no.  (), p. ; —no.  (), p.  (education). . Delo truda, no.  (), p. ; Vol’naia zhizn’, no.  (), pp. –. . Anarkhicheskii vestnik, no.  (), pp.  (cacophony), – (great event). See also “O svobode i bol’shevikakh,” Khar’kovskii nabat, no.  (), p. ; “Litsemerie demokratii,” Delo truda, no.  (). . “Deklaratsiia vserossiiskoi federatsii anarkhistkoi molodezhi,” Trud i volia, May , . . Volna, no.  () p. . . A. Gordin, Anarkhizm-universalizm (Moscow, ), p. ; Bezvlastnik, “Nuzhen-li perekhodnyi period,” p. . See also Vol’nyi golos truda, no.  (). . Trud i volia, no.  (). . Solonovich cited from Iarchuk, “Perekhodnaia stadiia i sotsial’naia revoliutsiia,” Volna, no.  (), pp. –. . Delta, “Stroiteli novogo Vavilona,” Volna, no.  (), pp. –. . Korelin, “Manifest Anarkhistov Kommunistov,” p. . . Golos anarkhista, no.  (), p. ; Odesskii nabat, no.  (), p. .



           ‒   . Volna, no.  (), p.  (things to come); Universal, no. – (), p.  (propaganda); M. S. V., “Anarkhisty i sotsialisty,” Volna, no.  (), p.  (seer); Volna, no.  (), p.  (trace). . Universal, no. – (), pp. , ; Volna, no.  (), p. ; —no.  (), pp. –. . Gorelik, Anarkhisty v rossiiskoi revoliutsii, pp. – (quote); see also pp. –. . A. Solonovich, “Vserosiiskaia general’naia konfederatsiia intellektual’nogo truda,” Revoliutsionnoe tvorchestvo, no. – (), pp. –. . Biulleten’ ob”edinennogo komiteta zashchity zakliuchennykh v Rossii revoliutsionnerov, no.  (July ); see also “Rost soznatel’nosti mass v stroitel’stve anarkhicheskogo obshchezhitiia i moral’ bezvlastnogo obshchestva,” Odesskii nabat, no.  (), p. ; “Chto delat’,” Rabochii put’, no.  (), pp. –. . “Koe chto o dele narodnogo obrazovaniia v sov. Rossii,” Volna, no.  (), pp. –; see also TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. ; Rabochii put’, no.  (), p. . . Vol’naia zhizn’, no.  (), p.  (bare hands); TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l.  (vile mug). . “Koe chto o dele narodnogo obrazovaniia v sov. Rossii,” Volna, no.  (), pp. – (young and toilers); Korelin, “Manifest Anarkhistov Kommunistov,” p.  (true school of toilers); A. Solonovich, “Ob Anarkhizme i Anarkhistakh v Russkoi Revoliutsii,” Volna, no.  (), p.  (fire). . All quotes in this paragraph from Avtonomov, “Intelligentsiia i rabochii,” pp. –. . A. K., “Intelligentsiia,” Svobodnoe obshchestvo, no.  (), pp. –. . A. Gorelik, “Kto vinovat,” Volna, no.  (), p. . . P. Mikhailov, “Politicheskie partii i ikh vzaimootnosheniia s proletariatom,” Volna, no.  (), pp. –; The anarchist view of the intelligentsia is also presented in L. Chernyi, “Etiudy o klassovoi prirode intelligentsii,” Klich, no.  (). . Volna, no.  (), pp. –. . “Klass i klassovaia bor’ba,” Volna, no.  (), pp. –. . Korelin, “Manifest Anarkhistov Kommunistov,” pp. –. . R. Borgman, “Neskol’ko slov ob nashikh organizatsiiakh,” Anarkhicheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . On the anarchist view of political organization, see also Burevestnik (Odessa), no.  (); “Partiia li?” Delo truda, no.  (), p. . . Cherkov, “K voprosu o partii Anarkhistov-Kommunistov,” p.  (path); Askarov, “Vorpsy anarkhizma-universalizma,” p.  (discipline); Ia. Linskii, “Oppozitsionnery rabochii i oppozitsionery ‘vozhdi,’” Delo truda, no.  (), p.  (vanguard). See also P. Arshinov, Novoe v anarkhizme (k chemu prizyvaet organizatsionnaia platforma) (Paris, ). . Despite the fact that the programmatic statements of Workers’ Truth contained no admission of association with Bogdanov, its position was traced by contemporaries to Bogdanov’s influence. For the history of Workers’ Truth as seen by the Bolsheviks see, E. Iaroslavskii, “Chto takoe Rabochaia Pravda?” Pravda, December ,  and “Postanovlenie TsKK po delu gruppy ‘Rabochaia Pravda’,” Pravda, December , .



           ‒   . V. Gorbunov, Lenin i Proletkul’t, (Moscow, ), p. . . Pravda, December , ; R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., ), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . “Obrashchenie gruppy ‘Rabochaia Pravda’ k XII s”ezdu RKP,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . “Vozvanie gruppy ‘Rabochaia pravda,’” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.  (), p. . . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , ll. –. . Ibid. . A. Zaitsev, Ob Ustrialove, ‘neonepe’ i zhertvakh ustrialovshchiny (Moscow, ), p. . . The position of Miasnikov’s faction—the Workers’ Group—a recalcitrant Bolshevik who dared to defy Lenin in the early s, was quite similar to the views defended by Workers’ Truth. The  “Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party,” authored by Miasnikov, labelled the Bolshevik leadership a “highhanded intelligentsia bunch” . . . animated by a determination to preserve both political and economic power in its hand, naturally . . . ‘in the interest of the proletariat’.” Hence Miasnikov’s resentment of the Bolshevik educational system, especially the schools for apparatchiki. It appears that by , however, Miasnikov’s hostility towards the intelligentsia had softened somewhat. His new programmatic document was ready to distinguish between Party bureaucrats and bosses, on the one hand, and “honest, proletarian-minded intelligentsia,” on the other. Miasnikov is quoted in P. Avrich, “Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G. T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group,” Russian Review  (), pp. –, . . Leikin, Protiv lozhnykh druz’ei molodezhy, p. . See also Pravda, February, , . . “Chistka vuzov,” Poslednie novosti, April , ; “Vuzy,” Poslednie novosti, May , ; “Shpargalka po chistke,” Poslednie novosti, June , . For the Kadet critique of the Bolshevik political indoctrination in the universities, see “Lenin i vysshaia shkola,” Poslednie novosti, February , . For the Kadet perception of the purge as a politicaly motivated suppression of heterodox students, see “Petrogradskie arresty,” Poslednie novosti, July , ; “Samoubiistva studentov,” Poslednie novosti, October , . . All quotes in this paragraph are from V., “O sovetskom studenchestve: pis’mo iz Rossii,” Poslednie novosti, February , . . “Klassovyi priem” (editorial), Rul’, September , ; “Tsarstvo nauki, kul’tury i obrazovaniia,” Rul’, September , . . Rul’, September ,  (upshot); “Bol’shevitskaia tabel’ o rangakh,” Rul’ June ,  (Narkompros). . N. Loskii, Chego khochet partiia narodnoi svobody (St. Petersburg, ), p. , quoted in W. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democractic Party, – (Princeton, ), p. .



           ‒   . B. Sapir collection, box . . V., “O sovetskom studenchestve” (those days); “Zapros o russkom studenchestve,” Rul’, February ,  (background). . “Klassovyi priem” (editorial), Rul’, September , . . Ibid.; see also Sav., “Chto delaetsiia v rossii: beseda s Peterburgskim rabochim,” Rul’, July , ; D. Sh. “ ‘Vchera’ i ‘segodnia’ Russkogo studenchestva,” Rul’, September , . . V., “O sovetskom studenchestve”; “Sotsialisty bez sotsializma,” see also Rul’, August , . . Prof. Gronskii, “Agoniia vyshei shkoly,” Poslednie novosti, June , ; V., “O sovetskom studenchestve.” . TsGA IPD, f. , op. , d. , l. . . Ibid. See also “Sokrashchenie priema v vuzy,” Poslednie novosti, November , . . Akademicheskaia chistka,” Rul’, June , ; “Rezul’taty akademicheskoi chistki,” Rul’, September , ; “K chistke vuzov,” Rul’, September , ; V., “O sovetskom studenchestve”; “Kukharkiny deti,”; “Leninskii Komsomol,” Rul’, July , ; V., “O sovetskom studenchestve”; R. S., “Polozhenie intelligentsii v Rossii,” Poslednie novosti, March , . . Gronskii, “Agoniia vyshei shkoly” (thinking); V., “O sovetskom studenchestve” (constraints); R. S., “Polozhenie intelligentsii v rossii” (tainted). . “O sovetshom studenchestve,” Rul’, July , ; “Polozhenie vyshei shkoly,” Rul’, July , ; see also “Nedobor studentov,” Rul’, September , ; Akademik, “Pis’mo iz Peterburga,” Rul’, March , ; “Klara Tsetkin o primirenii s intelligentsiei,” Rul’, July , . . Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia,” p. . . V. Golovachev, “Studenchestvo v Sovetskoi Rossii,” Rul’, October , ; I. Savich, “Smenovekhovstvo i molodezh,” Poslednie novosti, April , . . Golovachev, “Studenchestvo v Sovetskoi Rossii,” Rul’, October , . . Quotes are from S. Pozner, “Novaia intelligentsiia,” Poslednie novosti, December , ; see also “Novaia intelligentsia” (editorial), Poslednie novosti, December , . . S. Pozner, “Novaia intelligentsiia,” Poslednie novosti, December , . . P. Sorokin, “Novaia intelligentsiia,” Poslednie novosti, December , . . Z., “Pis’mo iz Petrograda,” Poslednie novosti, December , . . “Politicheskie partii posle oktiabria,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. – (), p. . . Voitlovskii, “Lenin ob intelligentsii,” p. ; Rubinshtein, Sotsial’nye korni reformizma, p. ; G. Zinov’ev, Ob antisovetskikh partiiakh i techeniiakh (Moscow, ), p. . The Bolsheviks had started, very early on, to write the story of their messianic intervention in history. The first Bolshevik history dates back to : M. Liadov, Istoriia rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi rabochei partii (St. Petersburg, ). Many histories were published immediately following the victory in : for example, G. Lindov, Kratkii ocherk istorii Rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi rabochei partii, (Petrograd, ); N. Baturin, Ocherk istorii sotsial-demokratii v Rossii, second edition,



           ‒   (Moscow, ); I. Vardin, Kratkaia istorii partii kommunistov (Moscow, ); A. Bubnov, Osnovnye momenty v razvitii kommunisticheskoi partii v rossii (Moscow, ). . A book celebrating revolutionaries “from bourgeois background” by Vera Zasulich could be published in  because the intelligentsia presented therein was active in the s and the s. Because this was a pre-Marxist period in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement this intelligentsia could be construed as a forerunner of the proletarian intelligentsia and not as its competitor. V. Zasulich, Revoliutsionnery iz burzhuaznoi sredy (Petrograd, ). . Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, pp. –. . Ibid. . V. Adoratskii, “Ob ideologii,” Pod znamenem marksizma, no. – (); I. Razumovskii, “Suchchnost’ ideologicheskikh vozrenii,” Vestnik sotsialisticheskoi akademii, no.  (). . Sakulin, Sotsiologicheskii metod, p. . . Bukharin cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, pp. –. . “Budushchee intelligentsii: disput v politekhnicheskom muzee,” Biulleteni literatury i zhizni, no.  (), p. . . Bukharin cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, pp. –. . Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, pp. –. . “Politicheskie partii posle oktiabria,” pp. –. . Lunacharskii cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, p. . . M. Reisner, “Intelligentsia, kak predmet izucheniia,” pp. – (unified); “Budushchee intelligentsii,” p.  (liberated); “Intelligentsiia v proshlom, nastoiashchem i budushchem: letsiia A. Lunacharskogo,” Biulleteni literatury i zhizni, no.  (), p.  (proletariat); “Sotsial’naia fizionomiia intelligentsii,” Biulleteni literatury i zhizni, no.  (), p.  (truism). . “Budushchee intelligentsii,” p. . . Kliuchnikov and Lunacharskii cited from Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii, pp. –. . Lunacharskii cited from ibid., p. ; Lenin from “Revoliutsiia i melkaia burzhuaznaia demokratiia: rech’ Lenina na sobranii otvetstvennykh rabotnikovkommunistov -go Noiabria  goda,” in Intelligentsiia i sovetskaia vlast’, p. . . R. Tucker (ed.), The Lenin Anthology (New York, ), p. ; Lunacharskii, Ob intelligentsii, p. . For the appraisal of the changes in the position of the intelligentsia made from the point of view of the nearly classless society proclaimed by Stalin to be in existence in the late s see, E. Iaroslavskii, “O roli intelligentsii prezhde i teper’,” Istorik-Marksist, (), vol.; O staroi i novoi intelligentsii (Rostov on the Don, ). . M. Brudnyi, “Nashi raznoglasiia i neodnorodnost’ proletariata,” Bol’shevik, no. – (), p. ; see also D. Rozit, “Rasstanovka klassovykh sil v perekhodnyi period,” Bol’shevik, no. – (), p. . The Soviet artistic vanguard talked in somewhat similar terms about transcendence of class identities. While referring to themselves as “workers of the mind,” the Imaginists, for example, insisted that rather than



 being inferior to the proletariat, they had actually already moved beyond it. The Imaginist manifesto stated: “We, akin to poets, are a declassed element. Indeed, our merit is precisely that we have already been declassed (deklassirovalis’). . . . The declassed position is superior to proletarian class-consciousness. The latter is only a plank on the ladder one steps on in the climb to the next plank—victorious humanity, a humanity of a single, united class.” The Imaginists were, of course, aware of the dangers of class degeneration. But they distinguished between the proletariat’s “declassing towards another class—a regressive phenomenon—and declassing towards a supra-class, a positive condition made possible thanks to new forms of social organization.” Yes, the Imaginists proudly confirmed, “we are declassed in the sense that we have already passed through the class state and through a period of class struggle.” Gostinitsa dlia puteshestvuiushchikh v prekrashom, no., (), pp. –; for excellent discussions of the interrelations between the Bolshevik futuristic visions and the Russian avant-garde in the s see, B. Groys, “The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the AvantGarde,” in H. Gunther, The Culture of the Stalin Period (New York, ), K. Clark, Petersburg. Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA, ).



INDEX

academic standards, ; and reappraisal of intelligentsia, –; university admissions based on, –, –; and university purges, , , –,  Adler, Max,  Aksel’rod, Pavel: on intelligentsia, , , –; on proletariat, , , –,  Alekseev, Petr,  alienation, , –,  Anarchists, ; response to Bolshevik regime, – Anarcho-Communists, –,  Anarcho-Individualists, – Anarcho-Syndicalists, , ,  androgyne themes, –,  Apocalypse, , ; and human agency, –, –; Revolution as, , –; and struggle against evil, – Augustine, –, –,  authoritarianism, and messianism, – Bacon, Francis,  “Beat the Whites with a Red Wedge” (Bolshevik poster),  Beloruss,  Berdiaev, Nikolai, – Blumenberg, Hans, , ; rebuttal of secularization thesis by, , –,  Bogdanov, Aleksandr, , – Bolsheviks, , , –, – (see also Communist Party); accused of betraying Revolution, –, , –; accused of exploiting proletariat, , ; analyzing effects of, –; and building Communism, , ; and class, , , , , ; and class identity, –, , –; and construction of New Man, –; criticism of, –, , –, –, , –; and intelligentsia, , , –, , , –; interpretation of Revolution by, , , , –, ; Kadets’ criticism of, –, –, ; and Lenin, , –;

and messianism, , ; poetics of, –; political education by, –; and proletariat, , ; relationship of, to Marxism, –; relations of, with other parties, , –, –; student attitudes toward, , –, –, , , ; symbolism of, –, –; and universities, –, –, –, , , –, –, ; use of rape theme by, –; vs. Mensheviks, –, , , – bourgeoisie, , , , , ; and Bolsheviks, , , , –, –; and intelligentsia, , –, , , , , –; pseudo-intelligentsia of, –, –; symbolism of, , – Bukharin, Nikolai, , ,  Bulgakov, Sergei, – Bulkin, F.,  bureaucracy, Bolshevik, – capitalism, , ; effects of, , , , ; in Marxist myths, –; partial revival of, –; relation of intelligentsia to, –, , ; relation of proletariat to, , , ; in Russia, ,  Capital (Marx), ,  Chernov, Viktor,  Chetkov,  Christianity, , ; emancipation and redemption in, –; history in, –, –; on human agency, , –, –; Neoplatonism in, –; salvation in, –, –; used by Marxists, –, ,  Chukovski, Kornei,  Civil War, , ; Bolshevik ideology in, –, –; explaining service with Whites in, –; social categories during, –, – class, , , , , –, , – (see also discourse, of class; identity, class); categories of, –, , –, , –, ; caused by capitalism, –;



 class (cont.), definitions of, , –; and gender, –; importance of, , –; and intelligentsia, –, , –; Kadets on, –, ; within peasantry, –; and proletarianization of universities, –, , –; and proletarian self-fashioning, –; in Russia, –; of students, –, , , , –, –, , ; symbolism of, –, , –; and university admissions, –, –; and university purges, , –, –; vs. estate categories, –, –; Workers’ Truth on, – class aliens, , ; denunciation of, –, –; disenfranchised as, –; students purged as, , , , ,  class consciousness, –, –, –, ; and capitalism, –; in Marxist messianism, , ; of proletariat, –, , –, –; in universities, , – class interests: delegitimized in politics, –; as obstacle to emancipation, –; and role of intelligentsia, – class messiah. See messiah; messianism class struggle, , , , , , ; causes of, , ; intelligentsia in, –; between proletariat and intelligentsia, –; at universities, –, – classless society, in Marxist ideology, –, ,  Cohen, Steven, n.  collectivism, , ,  collectivization, in Stalin’s revolution,  Communism, , ,  (see also Communist Party); in Bolshevik political education, –; class categories in, –; as contested term, –; as paradise, , , , –, –, ; progression toward, –, –, , –, – Communist Manifesto, , –,  Communist Party, , , , , –, ,  (see also Party cells); and intelligentsia, –, –, –, , –, –; intelligentsia in, –, –; and proletarianization of universities, –, , –, –; and proletariat, –, –; symbolism of, –; in universities, , , –, –; and university admissions, –, –, , , –; and university purges, –, , ; and workers’ faculties, , ; and Workers’ Truth, – Communists. See Bolsheviks Confino, Michael, n.  consciousness, , , , ,  (see also class consciousness); after Revolution, –; in Anarchist rhetoric, –; and creating Communists, –; development of pro-



letarian, –, –, –, ; of intelligentsia, , , ; as prerequisite, , ; proletarian, –, –, , , –, , –, , , ; raising, –; revolutionary, –, ; self-, , –,  constitution, Soviet, –,  counterdiscourse, in universities,  counterrevolutionaries, ; Bolsheviks as, –; Mensheviks as, ; and university purges, –; Whites as, –, – cultural history, vs. social history,  Dan, Fedor, , – Davis, Natalie Zemon,  “Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People,”  democracy, , , ; Kadet view of, –; Menshevik definition of, –; Social Revolutionaries’ perspective on, –; Workers’ Truth attitude toward,  determinism, , , ; economic, ; in Marxism, , ; vs. free subjectivity, –; vs. voluntarism, – Dictatorship of the Proletariat, , , , ; denial of, , –,  discourse: Bolshevik, , –, –; of class, , –, –, –; revolutionary, , ; Revolution as Marxist myth in, ,  economic reductionism, – economics, , ; and class interests, –; in Marxism, –, –; needs of,  education, , , – (see also universities); effects of New Economic Policy on, –; Party control over, –, –; political, –; of proletariat, –, , –, –, , ,  emancipation, , , , ; in Anarchist rhetoric, –, –, ; and intelligentsia, , ; in Marxism, –; of New Man, –; requirements for, –, –, , ; as salvation, , –; symbolism of, –, –; through changes in modes of production, – End of History, , , –, ; and human agency, , –; timing of, , , , ,  Engels, Friedrich,  Engineer Meni, The (Bogdanov),  Enlightenment, and Marxism, –,  equality, –, ,  eschatology, , ,  (see also Marxist eschatology); of Anarchists, –; gender themes in, –; Menshevik, –; and parallels in Christianity and Marxism, –; revolutionary, –; of Social Revolutionaries, –

 ethics, –, , , , ; and determinism vs. free agency, –; Greek vs. Christian, – evil, , , , –; in course of history, –, –; in Platonic tradition, – exploitation, , ; in Marxist eschatology, – faith, ,  Fall from Grace, –, –, – fellow travelers, intelligentsia as, – Feuerbach, Ludwig,  Fifth Party Congress,  First Congress of the Socialist International,  First Russian Revolution,  Fitzpatrick, Sheila, –, –, n.  Forward faction,  Foucault, Michel, –, – freedom. See emancipation Fromm, Erich,  Gastev, Aleksei, – gender: and class, –, –; and New Man, –; in Nietzschean Marxism, –; and revolutionary rape, – Gessen,  Gnosticism, , , –, –; influence on Marxism, –,  God, , ; as immanent, , –; proletariat as, –; union of man with, –; vs. human agency, , – Gorelik, Anatolii, – Gorev, Boris, – Gorky, Maksim,  government, Anarchists’ perspective on, – GPU, ; and university purges, –, –, –,  Great Retreat,  Gredeskul, Nikolai, –; on creation of New Man, –; on proletariat and intelligentsia, , –; on violence of revolution, – Greeks, rationality of, – Gurevich,  Hegel, G.W.F., , –, ; on human agency, –; influence of, on Marx, , , ; on union of man with God, – Hellbeck, Jochen,  historiography, ,  History, , –, ,  (see also End of History); in Christianity vs. Marxism, , –, , –, –; human agency in, , –; human self-consciousness of, –; interpretation of texts of, –; as linear, –, ; in Marxism, –, –, , , ; Marx’s conception of, –; meaning of, , ; myths in, –; reversal of

course of, –; of revolutionary Russia, –; Revolution in, –, –; role of God in, –; role of intelligentsia in, –, –; as struggle against evil, –; Subjects of, , , –, , ; Subjects vs. objects of, ,  Holquist, Peter, , n.  human agency, , , –, –; Christianity vs. Marxism on, –, –; in salvation, –,  human rights, –, – identity, class, , ; creation of, –, , ; defending, , , –; disenfranchisement from universities based on, –; in personal narratives, –; proletarian, –, –, , , –, –; of students, , –, –, –, – ideology, Bolshevik connotations of term, – idle elements, students purged as, ,  industrialism, evils of,  industrialization, training for, , ,  intellectuals, vs. intelligentsia, ,  intelligentsia, –, , –, , ,  (see also messiah; new intelligentsia); and admission to universities, –; after  revolution, –; and Anarchists, –, –; and Bolsheviks, , , , –; changing connotations of term, –, ; definitions of, –, –; evolution of, , –; Gredeskul’s conception of, –; guiding proletariat, –, , –, , ; and Kadets, –, –; in Legal Marxism, –; and Mensheviks, –, –; need for, , –, , –, –; and the Party, –, –, –, –; proletarian violence against, –; and proletariat, –, –, –, –, –, –; pseudo- vs. true, , –, , –, , –, ; rape of, –, ; reappraisal of, , –, –; role of, –, –; and Social Revolutionaries, , , –; as symbols, , –, ; and syndicalists, –; united with proletariat, , –, –, –, –; in White Army, – “In the Workers’ Faculty” (Potopaev),  Ivanov-Razumnik, – Izgoev, Aleksander,  Jews, attitudes toward, – Joachim of Flora, – Kadets, , –, , – Kalinin, Fedor, 



 Kautsky, Karl Johann,  Kerzhentsev, Platon, ,  Khodorovskii, I., , – Kirilov, Vladimir,  Kleinbort, Lev, , –,  Kliuchnikov,  Klucis, Gustav, – knowledge, , –, , ; denigration of, –, –; in Gnosticism, compared with Marxism, –; of intelligentsia, –, , –; of New Man, –, , ; and power, , ; and salvation, –, –, –; self-, ; use of, by proletariat, – Kol’tsov,  Komsomol (All-Russian Leninist Communist Youth League), , –,  Konchalovskii, Professor, – Kopelev, Lev, – Krupskaia, Nadezhda, –, – Krylenko, Nikolai, – Kuz’min, Aleksandr,  labor, ; and class consciousness, , –; divided into manual and mental, –, , –, , , ; mental, , ; and nature of man, , ; unity of physical and mental, ; uses of, –,  Lane, David, – language, , , ; Bolshevik, , , , –, ; and contested terms as slogans, , –; eschatological, –; Marxist, –, , –; symbolic, –, , –; and use of “intelligentsia,” –,  Left Bolshevik Opposition,  Legal Marxism, – Lenin, V. I., , , , ; and controversy with Bogdanov, –, –; criticism of, –, ; on intelligentsia, , , , , –, –, –; and Mensheviks, –, ; and Party, , –, ; on revolution, , , – Leningrad. See Petrograd “Let’s Speed Up Industrialization” (Bolshevik poster), – Lewin, Moshe, , – Liadov, Martyn, – liberalism, , ; Russian rejection of, , –, – liberation. See emancipation Lissitsky, El, – Löwith, Karl, , ,  Lozinskii, Evgenii, – Lunacharskii, Anatolii, , , , ; on intelligentsia, –, , , –, –; on proletariat, –, , ; and university purges, , , , , 



Luther, Martin, – Luxemburg, Rosa,  Makarov,  Makhaev (Jan Waclaw Machajski), –, , – Man,  (see also human agency; New Man); historical vs. ideal, , ; as laborer, , ; in Marxism, –, –, –, ; Marx’s conception of, , –, –; nature of, –, , ; and relation with God, –, – Manchester, Laurie,  Marot, John, n.  Martov, Iurii, –; on intelligentsia, –, ; on proletariat, , – Martynov, Aleksandr,  Marx, Karl, , , , , ; conception of man, –, –, –; and consciousness of revolutionaries, –; expectations of Revolution, –; on human agency, , , –; influences on, –, –, , –, ,  Marxism, – (see also Marxist eschatology; Marxist myths); class in, –, , ; compared with Christianity, , , –; criticism of, –, –; divisiveness within, , –; as doctrine of deliverance, –, –; and History, –, ; on human agency, –; influences on, –, –, –, –, ; and intelligentsia, –, –, –; language of, –, , –; Mensheviks’ claim to authenticity of, –; narratives of, , ; Nietzschean, – Marxist eschatology, –, –, –, , , –, , ; criticism of, –; narrative in, –; parallels with Christianity, –; role of Communist Party in, – Marxist myths, , ; capitalism in, –; continuity of, –; proletarian consciousness in, –, –; proletariat as messiah in, –; proletariat in, –, ; Revolution in, –, – McClelland, James,  Memoir of a White-Lining Student, – Mensheviks (Social Democrats), , , ; criticism of, –, , –; evolution of, –; and intelligentsia, , –, –, ; interpretation of revolution, , ; and Social Revolutionaries, –, –; on university proletarianization, , ; vs. Bolsheviks, , , –, , – Meshcheriakov, Nikolai, , ,  messiah, ; Bolsheviks as, ; criteria for, –; intelligentsia pushed out of role as, , , ; Mensheviks as, ; proletariat and intelligentsia together as, , , , ,

 , , , –, , ; proletariat as, , , , –, –,  messianism, , , , –, ; of Anarchists, –, –, ; of Bolsheviks, , , ; Communist Party in, –; exclusiveness in, –; in Marxism and Christianity, , , , –; of Marxists, –, –; as shared goal, , –; of Social Revolutionaries, , , – Mikhailovskii, Nikolai,  Miliukov, Pavel,  millenarianism, – “Mind, The” (Vikhirev),  modernity, –, – modernization school, ,  Molotov, Konstantin, ,  muzhiks, , – myths, –,  (see also Marxist myths) Naiman, Eric, – Narkompros, ; appeals to, –, , , ; class categorization of students by, –; control of education by, , –; criticism of, , , ; Kadet response to policies of, –, –; Menshevik response to policies of, –, –; political opposition of, –; and proletarianization of Soviet universities, –; and reappraisal of intelligentsia, –; and university admissions, , –, –, –; and university purges, , –, –, ,  narratives, personal, – nationalities/minorities, – nature, concepts of, –, ,  Neoplatonism, – Neo-Populists, , , – Nevskii, Vladimir, – New Economic Policy (NEP) period, –; Bolshevik intelligentsia in, –; class identity during, –; education during, –, ; effects of, , –, –, –, –; end of policies of, –; proletarianization during, –, ; as transition to Communism, – new intelligentsia, ; class nature of, –; differing perspectives on, –, , –; origins of, , ; and proletarianization of universities, –,  New Man, ; as androgynous, –; Bolshevik construction of, , –, ; creation of, , –, , , –; in Marxist ideology, –, , ; proletariat and intelligentsia in, –, , ; qualities of, –; and Revolution, , –; under Stalinism, –; in transitional period, –,  Nietzsche, Friedrich: on creation of New Man,

, –; on gender and class, –, –; and Marxism, – Novomirksii,  Obnorskii, Viktor, – occupations, ; and class categorization, –, ; of disenfranchised, –; of reinstated students and families, –; and university purges, –, , –, – On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels),  Opposition (see also Kadets; Mensheviks; Social Revolutionaries): Left Bolshevik, ; Right, ; and university purges,  Original Expropriation, , –, , – Osorgin, Mikhail, – “Out of Iron We Grow” (Gastev),  Ozhegov,  paradise: Communism as, , , , –, –, ; in Marxism and Christianity, , ,  particularism, ; of intelligentsia, , , ; of students, , ; vs. universalism, , ,  Party. See Communist Party Party cells: transferring power to university administration, –; in universities, , –, –; and university proletarianization, –; and university purges, –, , , , ,  peasants, ; admission of, to universities, –, –, –; admission of, to workers’ faculties, , –; and appealing denunciations, –; discrimination against, –, , , ; role of, in messianism, , –; as source for new intelligentsia, ,  personality: intelligentsia, ; proletariat, – “Pesky Fly, A” (Vrednyi), – Petrograd, ; universities in, , –, ; university purges in, –,  Petrograd Council of Professors,  Piatakov, Georgii, – Platonism, –, , – Plekhanov, George, , , ,  Plotinus, , , ,  Pokrovskii, Mikhail, , , ,  Polan, Tony,  political parties, , ; response to university proletarianization by, , – “politically suspect,” as reason for being purged,  politics, ; of discourse on class, ; lack of representation of interests in, – Polonskii, Viacheslav, , , 



 Pomorskii, Andrei, – Populism, , –, ; of Social Revolutionaries, ,  Posse, Vladimir,  Potresov, Aleksandr, –; criticism by, of Bolsheviks, , –; on intelligentsia, –,  private property, , ,  production, modes of, – professional revolutionaries,  “Proletarian in a University” (Shenkman), – “Proletarian Messiah, The” (Kirilov),  proletarian vanguard, emergence of, ,  proletarianization, of universities, –, –, –, –, –; and admissions based on class, –, –; Anarchists’ perspective on, , –; and emphasis on academics, –; Kadet perspective on, –; Menshevik perspective on, –; and new intelligentsia, –; responses to, –, , , –; Socialist Revolutionary perspective on, –; through workers’ faculties, –, – proletariat, , , , , ,  (see also consciousness, proletarian; messiah, proletariat as); Anarchists’ perspective on, –; and Bolsheviks, , , –, , ; in creation of New Man, –, –; declining number of workers, , ; definitions of, –, –, –, –; education of, –, –, ; Gredeskul on, –; hierarchy within, –, –, ; Kadets on, –; in Marxist myth, –; and Mensheviks, , ; need for intelligentsia, , –, –, ; opposition to intelligentsia, –, –, –; and Party, –, –; and peasants, –, –; relation of, to intelligentsia, –, , –, –, –, –, –, , –, –; symbolism of, –, , –; united with intelligentsia, –, –, –, –, –, ; in universities, –, –, –, –; as victims of Blanquists, –; Workers’ Truth on, – “Proletariat” (Pomorskii), – Proletcult movement, , , – Protestantism, denigration of knowledge by, – Proudhon, Pierre,  Provisional Government,  Provisional Siberian Government,  public vs. private spheres, – purges, at universities. See universities, purges at Puritans, and human agency, – Radek, Karl, 



Red Army, , ; service in, –; workers in, – redemption, in Christianity and Marxism, – “Red Present to the White Plan, A” (Bolshevik poster),  reforms, educational,  Reisner, Mikhail, , , , ,  revisionists, –, –, –,  Revolution, , ; Bolshevik interpretation of, –, , –, , , ; Bolsheviks accused of betraying, –, , –; Bolshevik vs. Social Democrat interpretation of, –, , –; in creation of New Man, –; and development of proletarian consciousness, –; effects of, , –; in eschatology, –, –; goals of, , , ; and human agency, –, –; in Marxist ideology, , , –; other interpretations of, –, , , , –, –, , –; proletariat and intelligentsia in, –; as rape, , –; requirements for, , –; and salvation, , –; Stalin’s, –, ; timing of, –, –; violence of, , –; vs. gradual change, , ; vs. revolutions, – Revolution, First Russian (), , ,  “Revolution from Above,”  Right Opposition,  Romanticism, , , ; influence of, on Marx, –, , ; subject in, – Russia, , –; adoption of Marxist eschatology by, –; backwardness of, –, , –, ; and proletarian revolution, –,  Rykov, Aleksei, ,  sacrifice, of proletariat, –,  Sahlins, Marshall,  Sakulin, Pavel, , , , – salvation, , –, , , ; as collective affair, –; Gnosticism vs. Marxism on, –; human agency in, –, , , –; and knowledge, , –; in Marxist myths, –, –, –; Marx’s vision of, –; requirements for, –, ; and Revolution, –, –, –, ; through the Party, –,  salvational histories, – Samoilov, Fedor,  Schwartz, Solomon,  science, ; in Marxism, , –; Marxism as,  Second International, –,  Second Party Congress,  secularization, ; of Christian eschatology, , ; thesis, –, , –,  Shakhty trial, –, 

 Shuliatnikov, Vladimir,  Shvedov, ,  Siberia: effects of New Economic Policy in, –; universities in, , –, – Social Democrats (Russian). See Mensheviks Social Democrats (Western),  social engineering, , ; in universities, –, , –, –,  social history, , , ; and class in Marxism, –; critique of, –; on New Economic Policy period, –; objectivist methods of, – socialism, , , ; relation to democracy, –; of Social Revolutionaries, –,  socialists: criticism of Bolsheviks by, –; vs. Kadets, –, – social mobility, , – social protest, Marxism vs. Church on,  Social Revolutionaries, –, ; relations of, with other groups, –, , –, , ; and university proletarianization, , – society: challenge to social origins of, –; origins vs. position in, , –, –, , ; public vs. private spheres in, –, –; relation of proletariat to, – Sorokin, Pitrim,  Soviet Revolutionary Committee, – Soviet Union: educational system of, –; Marxism in, , – Stalin, Joseph, –, , , ; revolution under, –, ; and social mobility, – Stites, Richard, – Struve, Petr, , ,  students (see also universities): attitudes of, toward Bolsheviks, , , –, –, , , ; class distinctions among, –, ; class identity of, –, , –; criticized as self-serving, –; responses of, to purges, , – “Student Worker” (Chudinov),  subject, ; in Christian vs. Marxist eschatology, –; Man as, ; vs. object, , , – subjectivity, , – Subject of History, , , –, , ,  suffering, –, – Sverdlov Communist University, , – Sword of the Revolution,  syndicalists (Russian), , , , – Tenth Party Congress,  Thirteenth Party Conference,  time, , ; in Marxist eschatology, –, –, , , , , , ; in other eschatologies, , ,  Tomsk: purges at universities in, –, –, , –; Soviet rule of, , –; universities in, , , 

totalitarian school, –, –,  trade unions, ; and university admissions, , –, ,  transitional period, –, , – troiki, , –,  Trotsky, Leon, , ; career of, , ; on intelligentsia, , – Trotskyists, on victims of Bolshevism,  Tugan-Baranovskii, Mikhail, ,  Ultra-left, response to Bolshevik regime, – ultra-radicals, on university proletarianization,  unity, , ; and gender themes in eschatology, –; loss of, , ; man’s decline from, –, ; return to, – universalism, , , , , , , ; of intelligentsia, , , ; of proletariat, –, –, ; of Social Revolutionaries, , ; of students, –; vs. particularism, , ,  universities,  (see also proletarianization, of universities; students); academics emphasized again in, –; admissions criteria of, –, –, , –; Anarchists’ perspective on, –; Bolshevik takeover of, –, –, , ; class struggle at, –; in construction of New Man, –; disenfranchisement from, –; opposition to purges at, , , –, –; Party cells at, –, –; purges at, , , , –, –, , –, –,  “USSR Rissische Ausstellung” (Bolshevik poster), – utopianism, –, – Vasil’ev, N.,  Verkhoustinskii, – Vesenkha,  Vikhirev, N. ,  Vinokur, Grigorii,  violence, , ; of Revolution, , , – Vol’fson, Semen, –, , ,  Vol’skii, –,  voluntarism, , –, , , ; in Nietzschean Marxism, –; vs. determinism, – wealth, disenfranchisement due to,  Wessell, Leonard, , ,  What Is Makhaevshchina? (Ivanov-Razumnik),  What Is to Be Done? (Lenin),  Whites: class struggle against, , –; intelligentsia and bourgeois in, , –; students’ prior involvement with, , –; in Tomsk, – workers. See Proletariat



 workers’ faculties, –, –, –; admission to, –, ; application to, –; criticism of, , –; peasants admitted to, –; purges from, –, –, –; symbolism of, –, ; in university proletarianization, –, , – Workers’ Truth, –



world, in Platonism vs. Gnosticism, – Zaitsev, D.,  Zalkind, Aaron, ,  Zasulich, Vera,  Zelnik, Reginald, n.  Zhaba, Sergei, – Zinoviev, Grigory, , , 