Intellectual Culture: The End of Russian Intelligentsia

No group cheered louder for Soviet reform, had a bigger stake in perestroika, and suffered more in its aftermath than did the Russian intelligentsia. Today, nearly a decade after Mikhail Gorbachev unveiled his plan to reform Soviet society, the mood among Russian intellectuals is decidedly gloomy. "The intelligentsia has carried perestroika on its shoulders, " laments Ury Shchekochikhin, "so why does it feel so forlorn, superfluous, forgotten"? [1] G. Ivanitsky warns that the intellectual strata "has become so thin that in three or four years the current genocide against the intelligentsia would surely wipe it out. " [2] Andrey Bitov, one of the country's finest writers, waxes nostalgically about the Brezhnev era and "the golden years of stagnation when... people could do something real, like build homes, publish books, and what not. " [3] The frustration and self-doubt afflicting Russian intellectuals today might seem excessive but they are hardly unprecedented. In the last hundred sixty years or so, every crucial turn in Russian history has touched off