Socialist Intelligentsia Research Articles

St. Petersburg — Petrograd — Leningrad Universities during 1905–1930s in Visual Sources

The article is focal research dedicated to reconstruction of the image of St. Petersburg — Petrograd — Leningrad universities in documentary photography. The study is based on photographic documents stored in Central State Archive of Photo, Phonographic and Cinema Documents of St. Petersburg, which is dated 1905 — the late 1930s. Author gives notes the specific of archival collection and gives and groups documents by topics, showing that the most popular plots were about students and faculty members as well as the participation of universities in political events. Results of the research allow complementing the socio-cultural portrait of professors and students and to trace how changed the image of higher education in public discourse during the period under review. Visual sources contain incomplete statements. Documentary photography reflects milestones of transformation Imperial universities into the Soviet one, its role in public and political life. The pre-revolutionary university was one of the Russian Empire political centers. Students often initiated strikes with political demands. Lots of professors were members of the Cadet party. Photographing was conducted to order, so at that time portrait and group photographs depicting members of academic community prevailed. After revolution in February 1917, firstly Provisional Government, then Bolsheviks positioned universities as public educational institutes that was reflected in documentary photographs. In photos of Soviet time there was a trend towards democratization of students’ and university members’ image, that was also due to opening new type of universities for trained personnel in the shortest possible time. It was primarily done for agitation and implementation of initiatives of Soviet government. Higher education was tasked with bringing up a new generation of socialist intelligentsia, so universities were presented as institutions loyal to Bolsheviks, like institutions rebuilt their work in accordance to the communist ideology for sake of building future of the country.

СОВЕТСКАЯ СТУДЕНЧЕСКАЯ ИНТЕЛЛИГЕНЦИЯ И ОБЩЕСТВЕННЫЙ ДОГОВОР: ПРОБЛЕМЫ ПРИНЯТИЯ И УЧАСТИЯ (1917-1929 ГГ.)

The article substantiates the need for a social contract between the state and the student youth in the changed conditions (from 1917 to the end of the 20s), the goals and conditions of each of the parties, examples of forced acceptance and the consequences of refusal. It gives the classification of Soviet students as well as the characteristic of polar student worlds, which manifests itself both in motivation for higher education and in relationships within differentiated groups. The author demonstrates extreme conditions of study in universities of the first years of Soviet power and the possibility of immersion in the process of spiritual production. The fact that the social group of students belongs to the intelligentsia is considered and the changes that occurred after the transformation of the higher education system, which resulted in the emergence of a new group of working socialist intelligentsia are characterized.

“Wounded” in revolution: the postwar intelligentsia and their self-distinction in Czechoslovak cinema (1956–1968)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the social representations of the critical socialist intelligentsia in five major Czechoslovak films made by Communist filmmakers between 1956 and 1968. These politically transgressive films provide valuable insights into how the reform-minded Communist intelligentsia viewed real socialism and their place in it. The films often portrayed intellectual protagonists stuck and emotionally struggling between careerist Party elites and an insensitive working class in the new socialist reality. Through content and reception analysis of several of the most influential films of the period, the article demonstrates how the critical intelligentsia distinguished themselves not only from Party elites but also from members of the working class in the post-1956 predicament caused by Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and, by extension, the ruling logic of Communist parties in Eastern Bloc countries.

Interpreting the Creation of Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989 / Shifts and Changes in the Politics of History and Memory

The article focuses on the construction of historical narratives and the construction of memory regarding the emergence of Czechoslovakia (28 October 1918) in the second half of the twentieth century. It analyses Czech and Slovak historiography and the significance of direct and indirect political and ideological influences. It explores shifts in the official narrative from the establishment of the communist regime to its collapse through an analysis of party texts, scholarly publications and conferences. The authors pay equal attention to the Czech lands and Slovakia. They focus on the role of historians as a professional community and the importance of institutional networks and examine the positions and viewpoints of the new historical departments (within the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) and shifts in university education. While the existing universities were to concentrate exclusively on teaching, the newly established universities (such as the University of Political and Economic Sciences – VysokĂĄ ĹĄkola politickĂ˝ch a hospodářskĂ˝ch věd) were tasked from the outset with educating a new type of socialist intelligentsia that had a close relationship to the people and/or to (re)educate publicity workers and state administration employees. As for historians, the article points to their professional and publishing strategies and the changes in opinions they underwent. In the second part, the authors address the issue of commemorating the founding of Czechoslovakia in the public space. They pay special attention to the celebrations in 1948, which aspired to a nationwide character, the revival of this tradition in the 1960s, and finally the society-wide response in 1988, when the significance of the establishment of the independent Czechoslovak state was reasserted in the form of granting it the position of a national holiday, and also the symbolism associated with this date became the impetus or mass public protest against the communist regime.

О ПОИСКАХ ИННОВАЦИЙ В ПРЕПОДАВАНИИ ФИЛОСОФИИ В УСЛОВИЯХ ТРАНСФОРМАЦИИ РОССИЙСКОГО ОБЩЕСТВА

The article is devoted to the search for innovations in teaching philosophy during the periods of transformation of Russian society, in the era of changes that have occurred twice over the last century. The first transformation, which covered the period from 1917 to 1937, was associated with the conquest of power by the Bolshevik Party, the construction of socialism, and the establishment of the dominant positions of Marxism-Leninism. The second transformation, which took place in 1991-2012, had a directly opposite direction: from socialism back to capitalism. It was characterized by the loss of power by the communists, the destruction of the socialist system, and the rejection of Marxism-Leninism. Both transformations had a direct impact on the teaching of philosophy in Russia. The Bolsheviks, in order to achieve their goal of building socialism and communism, widely used both the methods and techniques of teaching philosophy already known at that time and were looking for innovations. The task then consisted in the creation of a socialist intelligentsia with a Marxist-Leninist worldview. Innovation was meant to hastened this process. A similar situation developed during the second transformation of Russian society. Innovations in teaching philosophy were needed again, but now with the aim of destroying the socialist system and establishing capitalist relations. In both the first and second transformations, applied innovations in the teaching philosophy served certain political forces to establish their dominance, but for different reasons and in various ways.

Pushkin Is Our Comrade

Pushkin Is Our Comrade Andrei Platonov Translated by Ania Aizman34 The people read books carefully and slowly. Being hard workers, the people know how much of reality must be transformed, experienced, and suffered so that a real thought emerges and a precise, true word is born. Therefore the laboring person’s respect towards the book and the word are much higher than that of the intellectual with a prerevolutionary education. The new socialist intelligentsia that emerged among people of physical labor keeps its own, so to speak, old-proletarian, genteel relationship to literature. We have seen how young engineers, agriculturalists, and naval lieutenants, all of them people of the working class, spent half an hour reading one small poem by Pushkin, whispering every word to themselves for better, more plastic mastery of the piece. The seriousness of their relation to the human spirit, to art, is as great as the seriousness of their relation to work on a submarine, an airplane, or a diesel engine––if not greater. These people do not need Gershenzon’s advice to read more slowly in order to see the plants of poetry that live under the thick ice of superficial, apathetic attention.1 Now the reader is himself a creative person, and each has a field for inspired poetic work that is limited only by an imaginary horizon. No matter that this poetic activity may consist not in poems but in the Stakhanovite movement, for example. What matters is that this work requires heartfelt inspiration, a strenuous mind, and a public conscience. Pushkin himself has said that without inspiration it is impossible to work well in any sphere of activity, even in geometry. “God knows I cannot write books for money…,” Pushkin reported from Mikhailovskoe in the fall of 1825.2 Stakhanov also did not descend into the mine for an additional [End Page 101] pay packet one pre-autumn night in 1935. And at the beginning of their work the Krivonosite engine drivers3 followed their artistic feeling for the machine; they were not at all concerned about bonuses or a salary raise. Rather, both Stakhanov and Krivonos and their successors could have suffered from repressions––and some Stakhanovites were indeed subjected to them, because the enemy, whether conscious or unconscious, dark or bright, was near the Stakhanovites, and is near them to this day. It is always possible to humiliate, to tarnish the frontrunner, the inventive person. “You’ll split the rails, and we’ll come to a standstill forever!” said the backward railroaders to the Krivonosites. “Why don’t you service the course in a new way: for high speed and with a heavy load––like we service the trains!” the Krivonosites answered. The risk of art has always existed for an artist of any kind of weapon––whether a poet or an engineer. The task of socialism is to lessen this risk to naught because creative, inventive labor lies at the very essence of socialism. Pushkin’s risk was especially great: as we know, he always walked “the path of disaster,” almost constantly feeling himself on the eve of the prison fortress or the labor camp.4 The grief of imminent loneliness, of oblivion, of being deprived of the chance to write, poisoned Pushkin’s heart. Again storm clouds above meGathered in silenceJealous fate threatensMe with violence……………………………But, anticipating separation,That inevitable, fearsome hour,To clasp your hand, my angel,I hurry for the last time. (“Foreboding”)5 But this grief, once it has appeared, was always overcome by the creative, universal, optimistic Pushkinian reason; this was evident in the aforementioned poem (“To clasp your hand, my angel”) and especially in the next one: [End Page 102] Be proud, be proud, O singer; and you, ferocious beast,Play with my head forthwith;It’s in your claws. But listen and know this, you heathen:[…] you’re still a pygmy, trifling pygmy. (“André Chenier”)6 And the enemy himself, Pushkin’s “ferocious beast”––the virulent autocracy of Nicholas, who had the poet at gunpoint at all times––did not only evoke Pushkin’s anger or despair. No: rather, he laughed even more at his enemy, wondered at...

Autonomisation of the Cultural Field in Late Socialist Albania and the Emergence of Early Sociological Research

This paper addresses the following research question: what shaped the emergence of sociological research during the period of late socialism in Albania? The second aim of the paper is to reveal the causal mechanism by which a liberalised cultural policy brought about a shift. The traditional role of the socialist intelligentsia lessened in importance while the role of social scientists emerged. In the very final years of the state socialist regime, in 1989 to 1990, these latter were pitted against Party cadres and representatives in defending a limited yet free academic practice. In order to explain the intricate, early process of the emergence of sociology under state socialism in Albania, this paper utilises a layered theoretical framework that tries to capture the interaction between stages of regime development, the coexistence of various competing modes of legitimation, and the transformation of the heteronomous sector of cultural production into an emergent field of cultural production.

Educational Transfers in Postcolonial Contexts: Preliminary Results From Comparative Research on Workers’ Faculties in Vietnam, Cuba, and Mozambique

Worker’s Faculties, which have been widespread in the Soviet Union up until 1941, combined the two goals of preparing adult workers and peasants for university entrance through the provision of general education, as well as creating a new socialist intelligentsia from among these groups. After World War II, Workers’ Faculties were also established in postcolonial countries. Based on case studies in Vietnam, Cuba, and Mozambique, we argue that corresponding transfer processes were largely driven by local actors in the respective countries and that these institutions were regarded as suitable instruments in solving problems particular to postcolonial contexts.

How the Late Socialist Intelligentsia Swapped Ideology

How the Late Socialist Intelligentsia Swapped Ideology Vladislav Zubok (bio) The article by Zhivka Valiavicharska contributes to an important discussion about the cultural and intellectual history of “mature socialism.” This history, as the article makes clear, pertains to problems associated with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and what followed thereafter. The questions that this article brings to mind include the following: Why did the public intellectual and cultural space, funded and monitored by the communist regime, become so receptive to the “totalitarian” paradigm from the West? Was there a common pattern of ideological realignment among intellectuals not only in Bulgaria but also in other countries of the Soviet bloc, including the Soviet Union? How important was this realignment for the collapse of communism and subsequent radical economic reforms? These questions deserve a substantial conversation, and my comments below are just sketchy notes for it. In them, I argue that the porous boundaries between official and dissident thinking in Bulgaria did not mean the erosion of ideology but rather its substitution: the discredited schema of the communist “progress of humanity” gave way to a liberal schema of the same teleological power. Furthermore, I suggest that there was a common pattern of this intellectual substitution in Bulgaria and among Moscow intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Finally, I support the agenda of investigating continuity and change of political ideologies in Bulgaria and other countries in the post-Soviet space on either side of the political rupture of 1989–91. Valiavicharska’s case study of Zheliu Zhelev and his book Fascism speaks to the new literature on the intellectual and cultural space under late communism—a literature that questions the traditional dichotomy between public and private, dissent and officialdom, samizdat discussions and the official press. Zhelev was a remarkable figure, linking and transcending all [End Page 335] of the above. Expelled from the Party in 1965, he was exiled to the countryside, which provided him with time and space to finish his magnum opus. In 1981, the manuscript was published, possibly with the assistance of Liudmila Zhivkova, daughter of the communist head of the Bulgarian party-state. The Bulgarian secret police immediately declared the book an ideological diversion, while party apparatchiks eagerly snatched rare copies of Fascism, read it, and probably passed it to their relatives and friends. Among the most perceptive readers of Zhelev’s book were established party philosophers, who acknowledged Fascism as a fundamental denunciation of the communist system. It is not possible to classify Zhelev as a classic dissident, yet the impact of his book on the Bulgarian public was perhaps uniquely great. To understand the success of Zhelev’s provocation, it is important to discuss the specific nature of the socialist intelligentsia and the cultural–intellectual space it created. The monopoly of the communist party-state on publishing, printing, and even the distribution of paper remained virtually absolute. Just as money in contemporary capitalism is supposed to be in banks, in neo-Stalinist countries intellectual and cultural production was supposed to be in state-funded “creative unions,” state-owned universities, and so on. Stalin bribed intellectuals into the Soviet intelligentsia, and this bribery achieved what ideology often could not.1 Philosophers in Bulgaria and other socialist countries were supposed to be people who worked at the Institute of Philosophy, on the state payroll. Future Nobel Prize-winner Iosif Brodskii (Joseph Brodsky) learned in 1964 that an unemployed genius outside the Writers Union could not be considered a poet. The communist regime organized cultural and intellectual space so effectively that a truly deadly intellectual challenge to this regime could come only from within this space. Valiavicharska mentions the Bulgarian “cultural renaissance” of the 1970s and 1980s, which was probably linked to the patronage of Zhivkov’s daughter Liudmila. “Cultural renaissance” meant a growing number of state-paid cultural and intellectual activities, and stable jobs associated with these activities. It meant a record number of state institutions where intellectuals could congregate and interact among themselves: museums, libraries, academic institutes, and research labs. It meant the significant growth of an economic, cultural, and intellectual “gray zone” between organized public structures and the tolerated forms...

The Nation of the Socialist Intelligentsia: The National Issue in the Political Thought of Early Latvian Socialism

This article deals with the political debates of early Latvian socialists concerning the national question in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These debates were crucial for the later development of Latvian politics. The idea of Latvian democratic statehood was first pronounced and advocated in this context. The debate also strongly influenced those Latvian socialists, who as the ‘vanguard of Bolshevism,’ later became devout followers of Lenin. An interaction of several intellectual traditions can be observed in these debates, both German and Russian. The internationalist orientation of the later Bolsheviks (Fricis Roziņš, Pēteris Stučka) is mainly due to the influence of the German Marxism of the Second International. The democratic nationalist orientation (Miķelis Valters), to the contrary, is indebted to the influence of Russian narodniks, particularly Mikhail Bakunin.

Political Culture, Purges, and Proletarianization at the Institute of Red Professors, 1921-1929

The Bolshevik Party emerged from the Civil War with a reinforced distrust of bourgeois specialists and bourgeois intellectuals, yet with an urgent need to compromise with them in order to rebuild society. At the same time, grandiose plans abounded within the party to fashion a new social stratum-a proletarian, socialist, or workerpeasant intelligentsia-that would make reliance on the old elites superfluous.1 In the early 1920s, a new hierarchy of party educational institutions emerged to attempt the unprecedented task of forming this future elite.2 The way this social enterprise actually took place, however, reflected all the tensions, conflicts and contradictions inherent in training red specialists, proletarian intellectuals, elites that would somehow both spring from and serve the masses. Along with the Communist Academy, the Institute of Red Professors (IKP), the very name of which embodied these tensions, stood at the head of this new hierarchy of party institutions. Founded in 1921 to train a new, postrevolutionary generation of Marxist theorists and scholars, it soon became perhaps the most important center of Marxist education for the cream of the USSR's new socialist intelligentsia. Yet for several reasons, it has never been examined closely. In older Western historical literature, there was little attempt to study the development of such institutions: sources were lacking, the focus was on high politics, and the course of NEP itself was rarely seen as a historical problem.

Alexander Bogdanov and the Problem of the Socialist Intelligentsia

The two articles on Bogdanov in present issue of The Russian Review concentrate on same general problem but approach it from different angles and lead to different conclusions.1 The problem can be defined as proper understanding of Bogdanov's position in classical controversy about intellectuals in workers' movement. The first article, dealing with Bogdanov as leader of Vperedist faction of prerevolutionary bolshevism, presents him as yet another theorist of the tutelary role of social Democratic Intelligentsia in workers' movement;2 theorist whose views on this subject were in fact more consistent and extreme than Lenin's, and could therefore be used by those members of intelligentsia who wanted, consciously or unconsciously, to constitute themselves into a class. The second article, devoted to postrevolutionary period, subscribes to more widespread opinion-to view of Bogdanov as theorist of distinctively proletarian culture. From this perspective Bogdanov's Marxism-defined by him as philosophy of collectivism and finding expression in practices of Proletkult-appears to be staunch defense of autonomy of workers' movement and warning against excessive ambitions of organizing intelligentsia. In other words, two authors see Bogdanov as an important contributor to theory of intelligentsia as potential new but greatly differ from each other in defining nature of his contribution: first regards him as de facto supporter of tendency to form such class, while second classified him as theorist for whom possibility of class rule was threat to workers' movement, danger which should have been resisted and avoided. To bring this difference into sharp focus, we can say that first

Conclusion

The essays collected in this book reflect the complexity and differentiation of GDR society today. Contrary to a widespread image of state-socialist societies as nonpluralist and monolithic, they indicate that the GDR is a highly complex, advanced industrial society sharing some of the problems that trouble Western industrial societies. Differentiation as well as the accompanying partial auton omy of different social groups and institutions are real features of this society even if the consequences of differentiation are also contained by a strong state and a nonpluralistic party system under the leadership of the communist party, the SED. The growing differentiation of GDR society is the result of far-reaching economic and social change. The changes in the social structure are dramatically apparent when one compares the present situation with the initial phase of trans forming society according to the Marxist-Leninist goal culture in the late forties and fifties. The bourgeois intelligentsia has been converted by changed recruiting and training mechanisms into a socialist intelligentsia.1 Parts of the traditional middle class have disappeared, while a growing number of public servants are employed in health, education, state and social services. At the same time, the new educated strata represent an increasing diversity of concerns and interests. In agriculture, peasants have become cooperative farmers or workers in a state controlled agricultural system. The working class as a whole emerges as a highly differentiated social stratum, in which training and qualification, income, and position within the work process give rise to changing interest configurations and new values, attitudes, and behavior.

Chapter 6: Research and Teaching Cadres

The dynamic development of Soviet higher education and the successful realization of all of its multifaceted, educational, scientific, and cultural tasks has been based on the labor of the research and teaching staffs of higher educational institutions. The instructor—who is called upon to combine the talent of a scientist with the art of a pedagogue, and a profound scientific culture with a high consciousness of his social duty—is entrusted with one of the most complicated and responsible tasks, namely, that of teaching and educating highly skilled specialists, and familiarizing them with the achievements of human culture, i.e., that of exerting a deliberate influence on the professional and civic evolution of a progressive socialist intelligentsia as an active and involved force in social progress.

Patterns of Stratification in Socialist Poland

In the article attempts in Polish sociology to explain social structure and social stratification in socialist society are analyzed. The author claims that an adequate stratification principle or social determinant to explain the distribution of social attributes in socialist society is lacking. The theoretical significance of the concept "socialist intelligentsia" is analyzed and claimed to disguise an eventual social élite. The socialist intelligentsia and the Communist Party are, in theoretical contexts, treated as "black box" entities without regard to internal differentiation, an approach which covers basic social inequalities in socialist society. Problems of social conflict are usually reduced to the technical problem of setting fair wage limits. The thesis of social decomposition or status incongruency is contested and questioned as an indicator of social equality. The author argues that control over the economy might serve as an adequate social determinant in socialist society from which it is possible to derive secondary social attributes.

The Training of Theoretical Cadres for the CPSU

After the triumph of the October Revolution, the party of the Russian proletariat was faced with the task of creating a new, socialist intelligentsia, of shaping a strong force of competent party and government leaders, as well as scholars in the social sciences, who would be able to engage in the creative development of these sciences and teach them in higher educational institutions.

Intelligentsia Socialism and the “Workers' Revolution”: The Views of J. W. Machajski

The notion that the leadership of industrial society must eventually be ceded to an educated elite of technical and administrative experts is an important theme in the social thought of the last two centuries. It can be found as early as Saint-Simon's plans for the Système Industriel. As a criticism of the supposedly anti-proletarian aspects of Socialism it is commonly thought to have originated with James Burnham's idea of a “managerial revolution” and appeared later with Milovan Djilas's “new class”. Actually the criticism of “State Socialism” in general, and of Marxism in particular, for an alleged tropism toward managerialism was also a weapon in the arsenal of nineteenth century anarchism. An integral part of Bakunin's criticism of Marx, whom he called the “Bismarck of Socialism”, was the contention that Marxism in power would organize society “under the direct command of state engineers who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political class”. This thesis has had its most consistent and rigorous formulation in the work of Jan Waclaw Machajski, a Polish-Russian revolutionary who based his theory on the conviction that Socialism was not the ideology of the proletariat but of what he called the “intellectual workers”, the new middle class of white collar employees generated by industrial capitalism. The most important antagonism in modern society, thought Machajski, was that between the educated – to whom he gave the inclusive term “bourgeois society” – and the uneducated manual laborers. He argued that a portion of educated society, the Socialist intelligentsia with Marxists in the forefront, was attempting to gain for itself a privileged position in capitalist society by turning the labor movement away from direct action for higher wages and toward a struggle for parliamentary power which could only benefit the intellectual workers.

R. H. Tawney and the Christian Political Tradition

The conservative Catholic critic of socialist thought in this country is inclined to argue that at the level of explicit theory the neo-marxism of, say, Professor Laski is representative; but that the inarticulate masses in the Labour movement feel differently and would, were they articulate, express a theory more in line with the traditional Christian social philosophy. I dare say there is much truth in this argument, though whether it follows from it that the Conservative Party is closer than the Labour Party to the Christian tradition in politics is another matter, and one I do not propose to discuss. It is perfectly true that Professor Laski, with his uneasy combination of liberalism and marxism, is on the whole representative of the socialist intelligentsia. But it may be worth noticing that there is at least one socialist thinker of eminence whose work derives from the Christian tradition and is plainly of the highest order. I have in mind Professor R. H. Tawney. Certainly, his work has been less immediately influential than that of Professor Laski or Mr John Strachey. He has not been ‘put across’ by any publicity machine and, indeed, his thought is unsuitable for slick generalisation. What he writes is always the work of a scholarly historian and is academic in the best sense.