The Bolsheviks did not consider themselves native sons of the Russian intelligentsia. Revolutionary democracy had somehow been able to combine practical action with humanistic idealism.89 True, this was difficult even then (we remember Dostoevsky’s criticism of the Narodnik socialists) but nevertheless it was to a certain extent achieved. In general, combining humanistic idealism with Realpolitik is an extremely difficult task; although, perhaps, the future of mankind depends on the success of the attempt.
Be that as it may, we have seen that at the turn of the century the intelligentsia’s loss of its special role as the political vanguard meant that the ‘practical men’, associated with the working class, became separated, in the main, from the ‘humanists’, and the political movement from the movement of ideas. Everything that followed seemed to confirm the rightness of the ‘practicáis’. Even then, however, the moral superiority of the ‘idealists’ remained indubitable — in their own eyes, at any rate. Subsequent experience showed that the Bolsheviks were wrong to disdain the warnings of the ‘petty-bourgeois’ humanists (among whom were such major Marxist theoreticians as Martov). But at the beginning of the twenties there were few who were able to conceive that after the revolution of 1917 there could come the terror of 1937. For most people, the bloody upheavals were all behind them and what lay ahead was a process of reaping the results thereof.
In those years the Bolsheviks argued amongst themselves a lot about the intelligentsia. Some rejoiced that ‘the Russian intelligentsia will rise no more… Its culture will not rise again… And within twenty or thirty years the tribe of intelligenty will have vanished from the surface of the Russian land.’90 Others regretted the fate of the intelligentsia but declined to take responsibility for what had happened, saying that the breach between the intelligentsia and the revolution was due either to the former’s petty-bourgeois nature or to a ‘tragic misunderstanding’.91 Lenin also often thought about this problem. Voytolovsky even claims that ‘concern about the historical role of the Russian intelligentsia had for a long time given Lenin no rest.’92 But Lenin was nevertheless unable to work out a unified conception of this role. ‘We are startled by his sudden shifts from praise to blame,’ admits Voytolovsky93 when he summarizes a number of Lenin’s statements on the subject. He explains this by Lenin’s drawing a sharp line between the bourgeois and the socialist intelligentsia. That may be so, but it shows, then, that he, unlike younger Marxists — Martov and, later, Gramsci — did not perceive the intelligentsia as an integral entity, as an independent social stratum which, despite the complex and even motley nature of its composition, was able to elaborate a common ‘intelligentsia’ culture, ideology and psychology.
Among Lenin’s comrades the one who took most interest in the problem of the intelligentsia was N.I. Bukharin. He returned to the theme on several occasions, recognizing that the Russian intelligentsia had ‘experienced a very great tragedy’,94 but he was unable to determine the causes of this tragedy. He refused to blame his party in any way, not understanding where the essence of the tragedy lay. He saw this in a contradiction between the intelligentsia’s integrity and love of the people on the one hand, and on the other their refusal to support the people’s revolution. Treating the matter in this way meant that he had not grasped the most important thing. The Bolshevik revolution, which the intelligenty had done so much to prepare, trampled upon the very ideals that had led them to fight against Tsardom in the preceding decades. This was due, of course, not to any ‘evil will’ on the part of the Bolsheviks, who were themselves ‘hostages of history’, but to the objective conditions of the development of Russian society, conditions which in 1917 left no room for democratic decisions. What happened was therefore a tragedy, and one in which the fatal role was played by objective forces. That was something which Bukharin, still upwardly mobile after coming to power, did not yet understand…
No less contradictory was the Bolsheviks’ attitude to culture. This, for example, was what Trotsky wrote on this subject in 1924:
All this brings to my mind a worker of the name of Vorontsov who just after October was detailed to guard Lenin’s person and to help him. As we were preparing to evacuate Petrograd, Vorontsov said to me gravely: ‘If it so happens that they take Petrograd, they might find quite a lot that’s useful… We should put dynamite under the whole city and blow it all up.’ ‘Wouldn’t you regret Petrograd, Comrade Vorontsov?’ I asked, admiring his boldness. ‘What is there to be regretted? When we are back, we shall build something much better.’ I have not invented that brief dialogue, nor have I stylized it. Such as it was, it remained engraved on my memory. That was the correct attitude towards culture.95
What startles us here is not what the Petrograd worker said, but Trotsky’s delight at it.
It is difficult, of course, to require of the people who are creating their destiny through revolution that they show concern for objects the meaning, importance and beauty of which their former masters did not trouble to explain to them,
wrote Novaya Zhizn' in 1918. ‘But we not only can, we must require this of the people’s leaders, of the worker and peasant intelligentsia, of the government organizations and institutions.’96 In reality, however, Trotsky’s remark was typical of the intelligentsia. None other than the singer of ‘the Beautiful Lady’, Alexander Blok, issued this appeal in the revolutionary years:
Do not be afraid of the destruction of the Kremlin, of palaces, pictures and books. They should have been preserved for the people: but, in losing them, the people have not lost everything. A palace which has been destroyed is not a palace. A Kremlin which has been wiped off the face of the earth is not the Kremlin.97
This nihilism was part of a peculiarly ‘intelligentsia’ social idealism, carried to extremes, which enabled a Europeanized intelligent to like the way the peasants, out of ignorance, destroyed buildings which later they themselves, perhaps, would regret having destroyed. For Blok and Trotsky the act of destruction was itself transformed into an aesthetically creative act. However, no actual palace was being demolished, no actual book burnt. They conceived destruction very abstractly and speculatively, as the pure idea of ‘creative’ destruction rather than as practical activity.98
Obviously the ideologues of Bolshevism, who were themselves intelligenty, rejected the value of the culture of the past not out of ignorance but because they regarded themselves as the bearers of more important values. When reproached for not wanting Shakespeare or Molière, they protested: ‘But how can you put it like that? Shakespeare and Molière fulfilled their historical mission, and now they are of interest to the proletariat mainly from the historical standpoint.’99 We shall see later that Lenin — probably the first to do this among the party theoreticians — began to concern himself with the ideological rehabilitation of culture: at first, to be sure, in its role as a social instrument.