(From Paul Goble’s Window On Eurasia blog)

In 1851, Aleksander Herzen wrote that if Russia experienced “another century of despotism,” there was a very real chance that “all the good qualities of the Russian people would disappear and” that the people would be unable to maintain “their nationality and the educated classes “their enlightenment.”

That prediction, Moscow commentator Irina Pavlova says, spring to her mind when she observes the way in which Russia’s intellectual community has deteriorated thanks to the despotism of the Soviet past and the willingness of most of its members to serve those in power rather than their principles

reflects Russia’s lack of “the critical mass” of free intellectuals needed to play “the decisive role in the establishment of civil society and democracy” in Russia much as they did in Europe. And this “intellectual and moral crisis,” about which few speak, “is no less dangerous than the economic one” about which all are talking. 

Pavlova, one of Moscow’s most thoughtful intellectual writers on a wide variety of political and social issues, says that her conclusion does not mean “that in Russia people who see further and understand more than others have disappeared.” Such people, she points out, “exist, despite decades of negative selection” by the powers that be.

 “But,” she adds, “as philosopher Vadim Mezhuyev has correctly noted, “in Russia such an intellectual is not the rule but the exception and his fate to a large degree is tragedy because society rejects him.” 

In a discussion on why Russia did not make a breakthrough to liberal democracy after the collapse of communism, Mezhuyev argued that the absence of a large and independent intellectual class made that impossible given the opposition to democracy among those in power and those in the population at large.

In Europe, he said, “intellectuals played a decisive role in the creation of civil society and democracy. This process was an extremely long one – [the continent] had to pass through three ‘doors’ which separated modernity from the Middle Ages – the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.”

Russia, Mezhuyev continued, “has not passed through even one, because ‘we had no Renaissance and Reformation and the Enlightenment stopped midway, having touched only the upper stratum of Russian society.”  That history made the role of the intellectuals in Russia particularly important, but when the time came for them to act, they had been denatured.

European intellectuals, the Russian philosopher pointed out, rejected “any tradition if it was based only on faith and not on reason” because an intellectual is someone capable of acting in the name of freedom and not feeling the need to seek the defense of tradition or more often of those in power. 

If such people are sufficiently numerous, Pavlova says extending Mezhuyev’s argument, then, it is possible to establish civil society and democracy. But in Russia, despite the presence of many educated people, too few of the members of that group have “the ability to live and think freely” because of their long subservience to the state.

And the lack of such free intellectuals is why 1991 did not develop as many had hoped. Instead, as other Russian critics like Igor Klyamkin have noted, the “democratic intelligentsia” quickly again became “a hostage of political elites who were struggling not for democracy but for a monopoly on power by means of using democratic procedures.”

Read the whole article on Paul Goble’s Window On Eurasia blog here.