Privilegentsia, Property and Power

Abstract

The upheavals of 1989, propelling a playwright to the presidency in Prague and intellectuals from Solidarity into ministerial offices in Warsaw, have revived the old question about the function performed by the intelligentsia in the societies of central and eastern Europe. The question is controversial, since this intelligentsia, generally considered as bullied, gagged and hence the main victim of the Soviet system, is described by, say, Alexander Zinoviev, as gutless, submissive and, actually, a pillar of the regime. For Konrad and Szelenyi the intellectuals are a class in the making on the road towards power, while for Rudolf Bahro they are the main agency for a possible transition to socialism.' And these differences are not only the result of the ambiguity of the concept itself - the intelligentsia, in the narrow sense of the term, being perceived as an intellectual elite dedicated to a more or less radical transformation of society and, in a wider sense, as including all those whose labour is more mental than manual, those who went beyond the secondary school, the "educated tribe" to borrow Solzhenitsyn's rather contemptuous definition. Thus, the subject is a complex one and we can only touch upon it here. We shall approach it through Russia not only because intelligentsia as a concept was conceived in the Tsarist empire, but also because what happens in the centre weighs heavily on developments in the periphery: without perestroika, without a Gorbachev giving up the Brezhnev doctrine, Havel would not have become president nor Mazowiecki prime minister. Once we have seen through the example of the Soviet Union that the intelligentsia, far from being uniform, can perform several roles, we shall stop for a brief spell in Poland, where the intellectuals first contributed to the revival of a labour movement and where they are now trying to resurrect the bourgeoisie. Finally, we shall try to see what lessons can be drawn from these upheavals here, in western Europe, where commitment was already out of fashion among intellectuals even before the funeral of Jean-Paul Sartre.