Apart from economic and social interest groups there existed still one other source of potential resistance to absolutism, namely regional interest. The phenomenon was not unknown to Russia and it even enjoyed a certain degree of constitutional recognition. The governments of Muscovite and imperial Russia were usually in no hurry to dismantle the existing administrative apparatus of territories they had conquered; as a rule, they preferred to leave things fairly intact, at least for some time, content to transfer to Moscow or St Petersburg only the seat of power. At various periods Russia had self-governing regions over which the bureaucracy exercised only nominal control. In the reign of Alexander 1,when territorial decentralization was at its height, large segments of the empire were subject to charters which granted their inhabitants considerably more political self-expression than was enjoyed by any part of Russia proper. Under this ruler, Finland and Poland had constitutions and national diets empowered to legislate on internal matters; Courland and Livonia were administered in accord with charters, originally issued by the Swedes and confirmed by Peter 1, which made them virtually self-governing provinces; the nomads of Siberia and central Asia lived under a very liberal arrangement, almost free of external interference; and the Jews were given internal autonomy in the Pale of Settlement through their religious communal organizations called kahaly. But if one inquires more closely into the circumstances under which these exceptions to the prevailing centralism had been made, one generally discovers that the decisive factor was not the recognition of the 'right' of non-Russians to self-government but administrative prudence and shortage of personnel. The historic trend of Russian imperial evolution has been the very opposite of the British or American, tending relentlessly towards centralism and bureaucratization. As the civil service expanded, the autonomy of minority groups and their territories was curtailed under one pretext or another, until by the early 1900s there was almost nothing of it left. The Polish constitution was abrogated in 1831, and the Finnish
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in effect suspended in 1899; the charters of Courland and Livonia were thoroughly subverted; and the nomads of Asia as well as the Jews were fully subordinated to Russian governors. On the eve of the 1917 Revolution only the central Asian protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara still retained their autonomous status, and they were liquidated and incorporated as soon as the new communist government came to power in the area.
Such being the case, political opposition, if it was to emerge at all, had to come from quarters other than those customarily labelled 'interest groups'. No social or economic group in Russia had an interest in liberalization; to the elites it spelled the loss of privilege, to the rural masses shattered hopes of a nationwide 'black repartition'. Throughout Russian history, 'interest groups' have fought other 'interest groups', never the state. The drive for change had to be inspired by motives other than self-interest, as the word is conventionally used - motives more enlightened, farsighted and generous, such as sense of patriotism, social justice and personal self-respect. Indeed, just because the pursuit of material rewards was so closely identified with the constitution of the old regime and subservience to the state, any aspiring opposition was bound to renounce self-serving; it had to be, or at any rate appear to be, utterly disinterested. Thus it happened that in Russia the struggle for political liberty was waged from the beginning exactly in the manner that Burke felt it ought never to be waged: in the name of abstract ideals. Although the word intelligentsia is commonly believed to be of Russian origin, its etymological roots in fact lie in western Europe. It is a clumsy, Latinized adaptation of the French intelligence and German Intelligenz which in the first half of the nineteenth century came to be used in the west to designate the educated, enlightened, 'progressive' elements in society. In the discussions of the Austrian and German revolutionary parliaments in February 1849, for example, conservative deputies made reference to 'the intelligence' (die Intelligenz) as that social group - essentially urban and professional - which by virtue of its superior public spirit deserved heavier parliamentary representation.2 The word entered the Russian vocabulary in the 1860s, and by the 1870s became a household term around which revolved a great deal of political discussion.
Intelligentsia,.unfortunately, does not lend itself to precise and universally acceptable definition. Like so many terms in Russian history (e.g. boyar, dvorianin, muzhik, tiaglo), it has at least two meanings, one broad, the other narrow. In the broad sense, which is the older of the two, it refers to that portion of the educated class which enjoys public prominence - not far from what the French call les notables. In Turgenev's
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'Strange story', written in 1869, there occurs an early example of such usage when the hero on a visit to a provincial town is invited to a reception at which, he is told, there will be present the town's doctor and teacher and 'the entire intelligentsia'. This broad definition gradually went out of use but it was revived after 1917 by the communist regime. Averse to the concept of an intelligentsia as a distinct social category, as it cannot be fitted into the Marxian class scheme, and yet unable to purge it from Russian speech, it employs 'intelligentsia' as an occupational category to describe what in the west would be called the white collar class. By this definition, the Chief of the KGB and Solzhenitsyn are both members of the 'Soviet intelligentsia'.
The narrow usage has a more complicated story. Very much as has been the case with the designation 'liberal' in English, 'intelligentsia' in time lost its descriptive and objective quality, and acquired a normative, subjective one. In the 1870s, young people holding radical philosophical, political and social opinions began to insist that they and they alone had the right to the title intelligentsia. The point was not immediately conceded by those whom such an exclusive definition would put outside the pale of progressive company. But by the 1890s it was no longer enough for a Russian to have an education and play a part in public life in order to qualify; one had to stand in staunch opposition to the entire political and economic system of the old regime, and be willing actively to participate in the struggle for its overthrow. In other words, to be an intelligent meant as much as to be a revolutionary.
The result of the concurrent expression of two quite different ideas through the medium of the same word was confusion. In 1909 a group of liberal intellectuals, several of them ex-radicals, published a volume of essays called Vekhi {Signposts) in which they took to task the Russian intelligentsia for what they considered lack of political sense, irreligiosity, low morals, superficial education and all other manner of sin. There was no doubt among the readers who was meant. Yet the authors of the symposium were certainly themselves members of the intelligentsia in the eyes of the government and its supporters.
Confronted with this situation, the historian must make up his own mind. It would certainly be wrong to adopt the exclusive definition of the intelligentsia insisted upon by its radical wing. The struggle against the autocracy was joined by many people acting on liberal or even conservative principles who would have nothing in common with the whole revolutionary ideology. To exclude them, would do violence to the historical record. The inclusive definition embracing the entire white-collar group is even less useful because it tells nothing of political and social attitudes which were the very thing separating those conscious of belonging to the intelligentsia from the rest of the nation. The definition which we shall adopt falls somewhere between the two described above. It employs as its touchstone the sense of commitment to public welfare: a member of the intelligentsia or an intelligent is someone not wholly preoccupied with his personal well-being but at least as much and preferably much more concerned with that of society at large, and willing, to the best of his ability, to work on society's behalf. Under the terms of this definition, one's level of education and class status are of secondary importance. Although a well-educated and affluent person naturally is in a better position to understand what is wrong with his country and to act accordingly, it does not follow that he cares to do so. At the same time, a simple, semi-literate working man who makes an effort to grasp how his society functions and to work on its behalf does qualify as an intelligent; it is in this sense that in late nineteenth-century Russia one spoke of a 'working-class intelligentsia' and even of a 'peasant intelligentsia'.3