I want to talk not about the relationship between the intelligentsia and those in power, as you probably thought (everything has been chewed up here for a long time), but about whether the intelligentsia itself can hold power.
Last time I wrote about a sad anniversary (the 120th anniversary of the accession of Nicholas II), and a week later an even more sour anniversary approached. Not because 97 years ago a ruthless and inhuman force won in Petrograd (which is unprecedented in our history), but because on that day the idea of “intelligentsia” power, which the Provisional Government undoubtedly was, collapsed and went bankrupt. I still take that fiasco as a personal loss. For the only time in Russian history, an ideologically and stylistically close class to me tried to govern the state — and it turned out to be incapable of anything.
To avoid unnecessary discussions, I will make a reservation that the Gaidar government of the early 1990s, also an intelligentsia, nevertheless had a slightly different plot: not about the intelligentsia on the captain’s bridge, but about “a Jew under the governor”; The market reformers of that time did not have real power, and at the first opportunity, like a Moor who had done his job, real power turned around without any oners.
Another thing is the Russian government in February 1917. Let’s remember those ministers.
Prime Minister Georgy Evgenyevich Lvov. Philanthropist, altruist. He lived in exile, living in poverty and earning by physical labor.
Foreign Minister Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov. Professor, author of the remarkable Essays on the History of Russian Culture. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s father who shielded him from the bullet of an ultra-right terrorist.
Minister of Justice Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky. Defender at «political» trials during the years of reaction. Outstanding speaker. He survived everyone, he died at the age of ninety in America.
War Minister Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov. A man is a legend, a rare type of macho intellectual. He fought for the freedom of oppressed peoples around the world, fought duels, and had outstanding organizational skills. Died in exile.
Minister of Railways Nikolai Vissarionovich Nekrasov. Prominent engineer. Remained in the USSR. Naturally, he was shot — for «wrecking».
Minister of Trade and Industry Alexander Ivanovich Konovalov. Progressive manufacturer, fighter for workers’ rights. Died in exile.
Minister of Education Alexander Apollonovich Manuilov. Rector of Moscow University, who resigned from his post in solidarity with the students. Remained in Russia. Managed to die before the Great Terror.
Finance Minister Mikhail Ivanovich Tereshchenko. A sugar refiner, a fantastically rich man. Having lost everything in Russia, he made a new fortune in Europe, no less than the previous one. Helped migrants in need.
Minister of Agriculture (a very important portfolio in a peasant country) Andrey Ivanovich Shingarev. Killed in a Bolshevik prison.
With all the ideological and personal differences, all of them, even the “oligarch” Tereshchenko, are undoubtedly our people, you can’t disown. If they lived today, they would have clustered around Ekho Moskvy, performed at Dozhd and had a hundred thousand followers on Twitter, and Kerensky could easily have a million.
At the same time, people were all strong, bright, talented, courageous, not afraid of responsibility. Why didn’t they succeed? How did they, so smart and wonderful, let themselves be devoured by Lenin’s gang?
It seems to me that the reason is not in personal shortcomings and not in the interweaving of random fatal factors, but in specific professional unsuitability. A group of people who, being in different parties, were guided by a single set of basic values (simplified, they can be denoted by the term “Self-Dignity”) were organically unable to cope with the then situation.
The situation, remember, was this:
1. A country where three quarters of the population are illiterate, and ninety percent of the «literate quarter» are poorly educated and do not consider CSD to be of particular value, the memory of serfdom has not yet faded away.
2. The hardest war.
3. The devastation caused by the war.
In order to keep the state from collapsing in such conditions, it was not a democracy that upholds the rights of the individual, but its diametrical opposite — a tough military regime capable of ensuring the operation of emergency mechanisms, discipline and order. It could be either a far-right dictatorship or a far-left one.
The interim government, in the middle of its short term, tried to reformat itself into a kind of soft dictatorship, and Kerensky even managed to cope first with an attempt at a left coup (in July), then with an attempt at a right coup (in August), but he was “synth-intelligent” — he did not shoot either Kornilov or Trotsky with Lenin. (And if he had shot, then the Provisional Government would have fallen out of the category of «intellectual power»). In the end, the inevitable happened. Beautiful intellectual principles crashed on the gee cliffs of Russian reality.
And since then, for a century now, everyone who is not too lazy to poke the intelligentsia (modern synonym: “liberals”) with their noses into the dung cake of the October Revolution: well, we saw what your government leads to, we know. You might think that that other, arrestocracy power has never in history sat in a puddle.
OK. The question I want to ask myself and you, in fact, is this.
Even if in 1917, in those conditions and in that Russia, the intelligentsia could not govern. And in today’s Russia?
Personally, I don’t think it can. First there will be beautiful declarations, then pitiful results. And so it will be until the estate is qualitatively updated, enriched with several new characteristics.
What are these required characteristics?
In my opinion, there are three of them.
Firstly, the ability to consolidate in the name of a common cause, without sticking out one’s unique originality for any appropriate or inappropriate occasion.
Secondly, the ability to defend — if necessary, with your fists — ideas that you believe in.
Thirdly, it is not only beautiful to lose, but also beautiful to win. I emphasize: it is beautiful to win. If victory is ugly, then this estate will be no better than the opposite.
Now you ask me: how do they acquire these meritorious characteristics?
I will answer with the words of lieutenant Myshlaevsky: «Achieved by exercise.» And no more.