The post-intelligentsia and the Russian catastrophe of the twenty-first century

I’ve already had an occasion to note how authoritarian regimes in Russia replace each other (Piontkovsky, 2009). It isn’t some eternal blow or a daring foray by the opponents that brings down the government. Instead, the regime collapses suddenly from a strange malaise, existential disgust with itself (Sartre’s la nausée), the kind that currently plagues Putin’s regime. Clearly, his system is ailing, even though it has successfully paved over the entire political landscape in Russia. If the post-Communist decades have yielded such paultry results, it is in large measure because of the intelligentsia, or as its representatives prefer to call themselves these days – ‘intellectuals.’ The latter have betrayed the ideals of Andrei Sakharov. In the 1990s, the selfproclaimed reformers showed more reverence to Augusto Pinochet than to the principle Sakharov valued the most –morality in politics. Russia’s ‘systemic liberals’ bear the responsibility for bringing Putin and his KGB thugs to power and fostering the ‘bandit capitalism’ that is now pushing the country down the path of demodernization. For Sakharov, democracy was an honest electoral contest between competing political forces. For Russian ‘systemic liberals,’ it is a system that allows ‘democrats’ to preserve power and wealth by any means possible. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov would have bristled at the idea that the people were ignorant sheep waiting to be led to a better life by self-proclaimed ‘progressive thinkers.’ The Russian political class is convinced that barely 10–15% of the Russian population is ready for modernization, and that without the ‘enlightened’ leadership the country would be lost. The Russian post-intelligentsia turned away from Sakharov’s legacy when its members assumed power or were hired by the authorities. In the process, they committed moral and ideological suicide. It would be a mistake to view the intelligentsia’s recitations about the backwardness of the Russian people unprepared for democracy as just Kremlin talking points. Rather, we should see in this mantra a desperate attempt to salvage self-respect and rationalize the betrayal of their countrymen by the intelligenty. Untranslatable into other languages, the word ‘intelligentsia’ signifies a peculiarly Russian phenomenon, an amorphous social mini-group that sprang to life as a by-