The Rape of the Intelligentsia: A Proletarian Foundational Myth

Abstract

olshevik visionaries dreamt of a society dramatically changed, in which victim of old order was destined to become ruler of new. The paragon of Revolution, perfect Bolshevik, would become a New Man-a strong, free and conscious creature emancipated from allegedly distorted and servile capitalist psyche. The New Man could come only from ranks of proletariat, class messiah. But under capitalism proletariat, blind and unaware of itself, embodied only promise of redemption, not its actuality. For redemption to occur first had to attain consciousness, which in turn required unification with intelligentsia, custodian of consciousness. The unification of and intelligentsia as culmination of History-the Revolution-would herald new society and New Man. By probing into relationship between and intelligentsia, I seek to understand roles of these classes in this salvational mytho-drama. I am less interested in historiographical debates over concrete interplay between workers and intellectuals in Russian history than in mythical structure that endows this interaction with meaning. My core claim is that Russian required intelligentsia because of conceptual linkage between the proletariat and the intelligentsia-having postulated an alienated class savior, Marxist meta-historical narrative demanded a complementary vehicle to return this messiah to its true consciousness. This leads me to conclusion that it is unity of revolutionary language, not objective reality that language purported to reflect, which introduces uniformity into interpretation of relationship between and intelligentsia in revolutionary Russia. That messianic agency is split in half-a proletarian body and its intelligentsia mind-is particularly apparent in Nietzschean Marxism. The conceptual interdependence of two classes comes into sharp relief once we take into account gender categories, which support meaning of (marked as male) and intelligentsia (marked as female). Nietzschean Marxists' densely gendered