‘Neither class,nor party’

Instead of an introduction: On terminology

In the context of the problem of intelligentsia Vygotsky was undoubtedly lucky – he was too young to participate in the pre-revolutionary whirlpools of ideological battles (especially in the period 1905–14, though he was already a student during the First World War), and he was too ‘provincial’ for the same activity. He (and people of his generation) entered into the scientific life of the young Soviet state exactly at the time when it tried to ‘put into order’ all scientific (as well as political) processes and it urgently needed new, young workers at the forefront of science.

The historian of the intelligentsia L. K. Yerman gave the following definition: ‘a social stratum consisting of people who are engaged in intellectual work’ (Yerman, 1966: 7). This definition seems to be too obvious to fully comprehend this phenomenon. Yet in the Russian context we have to distinguish between intelligentsia and intellectuals (i.e. persons dealing with ‘brain work’). The term ‘intelligentsia’ (within the meaning of a stratum of highly educated people who perform activities requiring a high degree of intelligence and creativity) was introduced by P. D. Boborykin in 1866. It was a substitute for another term, ‘nihilist’, which, in turn, was introduced by Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons (Malinin, 1999: 187). Further development of the meaning of the term ‘intelligentsia’ was associated with the social movement of Narodniks (narodniki, narodnichestvo, ‘people-ism’), who preferred khozhdenie v narod [going to people, folk] as a form of agitation and propaganda forwarding original ideas of ways of Russian social development (Maslin, 1999: 311). According to this position – the intelligentsia should engage in critical thinking useful to people in order to transform society in the spirit of the socialist ideal (Malinin, 1999: 187). Thus, from the very beginning the idea of ‘own way’ or ‘criticism’ was inherent in the notion of Russian intelligentsia. It is appropriate to ask at this juncture – who were these highly educated, intellectual representatives of Russian society and how numerous were they?

According to the first (and the last) tsarist census (1897) almost 870 thousand people may be assigned to the status of intellectual workers (e.g. school teachers, officials, professors, students, members of the military, postal workers, creative workers) ( Sovetskaia intelligentsia, 1968: 17). Generally, when someone initiates a discussion on the Intelligentsia, the main focus is upon ‘creative intellectuals’ [tvorcheskaya intelligentsia] – artists, writers, poets, painters, literary critics, etc. Nevertheless, these last-mentioned groups, as we have shown, were only a part of it. Of course, they always preferred to name themselves as a unique group of rulers of the public consciousness but another group of highly educated people (teachers, doctors, engineers) was also entitled to regard itself as part of the intelligentsia.

‘Russia is the country with an unpredictable past’ – a phrase usually attributed to Alexander Herzen – could be used as a perfect epigraph for this article. The Russian word intelligentsia is derived from the Latin intelligens that means ‘rational’ or ‘sensible’ but in the Russian context this term acquired a unique and controversial meaning with a long history and multiple nuances:

… we need to start with an undisputable fact: there exists (existed) a group of people, who name themselves as Russian intelligentsia and it is recognized also by their enemies. There also exists a self-consciousness of that group. (Fedotov, 1991[1926]: 67)

From the very beginning the seeds of political discussion and struggle were sown in the fruitful and controversial ground of the great Russian literature. Later on, science and scientific journals were also involved in political matters in the absence of political freedom. That is why later, in 1908, one Russian (the revolutionary V. I. Lenin) will name another Russian (the writer L. N. Tolstoy) as a ‘mirror of the Russian revolution’, so politically ‘electrified’ was literature and life, the latter helping the former to grow and blossom. The intelligentsia always considered itself as in opposition to the official administration, to the government. As diverse and multiform as the whole empire, the Russian intelligentsia was not homogeneous. Literature (and criticism) as a substitute for public thought … so there was nothing unusual in the young Vygotsky’s starting his ‘career’ from literature.

From great reforms to confrontation

The roots of the political struggle in science (which was fully demonstrated in the 1920–1930s) may be observed since the 1850s, when, due to a general moral crisis, several political directions emerged. The Crimean War (1853–6) – or more precisely Russian losses in that war – made possible accelerated ‘Great Reforms’. On the back of such reforms (I may add – in unison with such reforms) several political forces appeared:

… serfdom-reactionaries, liberal bureaucrats, who ruled all reformations (the brothers N. A. and D. A. Milutin and others), liberals of Slavophil and westernized kinds (K. D. Kavelin, Y. F. Samarin, A. M. Unkovsky and others), democrats and revolutionary democrats … anticipations of three future political camps – protective-conservative, liberal and revolutionary – had already loomed quite prominently at that time. ( Istoriya politicheskikh partiy, 1994: 44–5)

Thus, under the term ‘Soviet intelligentsia in the 1917–early 1920s’ we may distinguish several groups. (1) There was the ‘old’ intelligentsia that accepted the new Soviet authorities (e.g. the psychiatrist V. M. Bekhterev). (2) There were ‘doubters’ or ‘neutral’ representatives of the old intelligentsia who preferred not to express their political views but rather to ‘serve people’. In later years they could take both parts – whether pro- or anti-Soviet; for example, the real hero of the First World War, General Alexey Brusilov, who was later to become an officer of the Red Army, was a neutral in the revolutionary years (e.g. Sovetskaia intelligentsia, 1968: 24) Membership of this group might also be attributed to the above-cited G. Fedotov – in 1925 he got permission to go abroad on a scientific visit but decided not to come back. (3) There was a strictly speaking ‘anti-Soviet’ intelligentsia: people who openly protested against the new authorities and later were forced to leave the country (e.g. P. Sorokin and the main body of liberal intellectuals). (4) There were the new Soviet intellectuals: people who had obtained their education (even school education) in the tsarist era but whose ‘self-conscious’ period of activity began after 1917. Vygotsky might be attributed to the latter.

It is important to understand that all the representatives of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1910s and later in the early Soviet era (1920–1930s) were students in the 1880–90s period. That is why the so-called ‘students’ issue’ [studencheskiy vopros] is extremely important in the context of the present article for an understanding of how such a dichotomy between fathers and sons came to exist. To be more clear – there were several similar ‘vopros’es’ and the students’ one is only a part of the tragic suite under the broad term ‘government and society’. The appendency of so-called ‘Jewish and Polish issues’, where a large number of people was forced to emigrate from the Russian Empire, accelerated revolutionary activity within Russia. The ‘Jewish issue’ was also central in Lev Vygotsky’s life during the most unexplored period of 1914–24 (see Zavershneva, 2013). As van der Veer (2007: 18) noted: ‘In Tsarist Russia, he [Vygotsky] might have become an excellent lawyer or a beloved general practitioner but no academic career would have been possible.’

The October revolution abolished the regulations against Jews that were established in the tsarist era, but – as in any revolution – there was not only the ‘transition from one political system to another’ but also the turbulent maelstrom and the total disruption of many traditions, many rules, as well as the physical annihilation of millions of people. Such a situation demanded that educated and aspirating people ‘rise above’ the general disorder:

After the revolution, Vygotsky – like many other intellectuals – became immensely active as a teacher of evening courses to uneducated adults. He also seems to have accepted the Marxist worldview (more than its ‘implication’ in Russia, perhaps). (van der Veer, 2007: 19)

In 1884 a new university statute had been established in Russia (to replace that of 1863). The new rules of university organization were more restrictive in terms of academic and political freedom – rectors, deans and other university leaders were now ruled and guided by the Ministry of Education (under the1863 rules they were electable by the universities themselves). It would not be an exaggeration to say that in that period for the government the word ‘student’ meant, first of all, ‘rebel’ or ‘revolutionary’ and only after that its dictionary meaning. In 1902 the Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte (1849–1915), during his conversation with professors of Kiev Technical University remarked:

… neither I nor you can admit … that students were engaged in politics. In essence it is absurd: if a student is in good faith with his studies, he will have no time to deal with politics. Secondly, what kind of political maturity can a young man have, who does not even know life well? (Iz istorii Kievskogo, 1961: 112)

The formation of political parties in our modern understanding occurred in 1905, when the last tsar was forced to publish his ‘October manifesto’, where political freedom was officially declared. And all the tendencies and streams of the Russian political river seethed with the new bang in the most controversial period of Russian history during the last decade of the Tsarist Empire. But after obtaining political freedom citizens needed to become politically free. Such a process of becoming took very contradictory forms – the rival camps varied from radically left-wing to opposing right-wing forces, from Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to radical nationalists of the ‘Black Hundreds’. Between these poles, the Party of People’s Freedom (constitutional democrats, Kadets) was able to take into its ranks a large group of Russian intellectuals.

Personal vs. scientific: From confrontation to separation

The degree of political unrest was extremely high in this period – for example, the congresses of psychology that took place between 1906 and 1916 were more like political congresses, with speeches, declarations and protests. Let us illustrate the situation in psychology by introducing an episode from the relationship between professor of philosophy Alexander Ivanovich Vvedensky (1856–1925) and his student at Petersburg University Alexander Petrovich Nechaev (1870–1948). This episode took place between 1901 and 1906 and started from a very common occurrence of that period – the travel abroad of the young student Nechaev after finishing his university education. Being under the supervision of Vvedensky, Nechaev might have become a famous metaphysician, but he moved into experimental psychology (in its Wundtian meaning). A scientific probation close to Wundt in Leipzig and Kraepelin in Heidelberg persuaded Nechaev to escape from Vvedensky’s view of philosophy and psychology; an experimental approach to this science seemed for the young scholar the way to study the human … all too human. Nechaev returned home in 1901 and immediately began organizing a laboratory of experimental psychology. ¹ Of course, such a turn from a metaphysical to a roughly materialistic domain within psychology, made by Nechaev, was regarded by his teacher as treason. Such a turn in the understanding of what psychology should deal with initiated a dramatic and stormy chain of events in the relationship between Nechaev and Vvedensky between 1901 and 1906. In 1901 Nechaev planned to defend his Master’s thesis that he had already started writing under Vvedensky’s supervision. Vvedensky tried by all possible means to postpone the procedure of the official presentation of his dissertation by inventing new reasons not to sign up for it. Finally this work was presented and published as a separate book in 1901, and – of course – caused a wave of critical remarks from the ‘idealistic’ philosophy camp. In the autumn of the same year, 1901, the review of Nechaev’s book appeared in the prestigious Voprosy Filosofii i Psikhologii [Problems of Philosophy and Psychology]; the author of the review Y. I. Aikhenvald found Nechaev’s conceptions (as well as his experimentations in psychology) incomplete and imperfect in terms of both theory and applications. The same Aikhenvald was later to become an adviser for Lev Vygotsky’s thesis on Hamlet.

The procedure in the defense of Nechaev’s thesis might be considered as a dramatic example of human villainy. Both readers (the physiologists N. E. Vvedensky and I. Lapshin) positively evaluated the thesis, but N. E. Vvedensky (homonym of Nechaev’s former adviser) refused to vote, arguing that he was not a member of the faculty; Lapshin gave a positive evaluation; Alexander Vvedensky actively stood out against the dissertation and by his behavior convinced other members of the committee to vote negatively – but (!) voting himself (he did so last) voted positively. The situation, created by this episode, was not even dramatic but rather – tragicomical: Vvedensky, who had actively protested against a positive evaluation, voted for the thesis. Nechaev was more than offended. He was later to successfully defend his thesis in 1905 (see Yermichov, 2003; also Maslov, 2014).

This tiny episode shows clearly that scientific conflict as any other in life usually grows from nonsense and may lead to real confrontation. Yet, at that time (1905–17), conflicts in life and in science remained within life and science even if the political and personal price was too high to ignore. Later on, the situation will take other forms and guises, but the latter will only strengthen political and scientific controversies. But Nechaev’s case is a nice example of the father–son problem in science; a decade later such opposition led to open hostility and this will be reflected in the civil war.

No less dramatic and more tragic (in terms of negative outcomes for science) was the perennial opposition between two giants of Russian science – V. M. Bekhterev and I. P. Pavlov. Their conflict went through many stages and had already begun in their student years. Decades later, in 1936, one of Bekhterev’s students, Ludvig Puusepp – a founder of Russian neurosurgery – wrote in his memoirs on Pavlov:

If students of V. M. Bekhterev did a report – then I. P. Pavlov always was opposite to the spokesperson, but not all the time were Pavlov’s remarks correct and they were usually personal in nature. If students of I. P. [Pavlov] were making their reports, Bekhterev found it necessary to make objections, and it was clear that he directed those objections against Pavlov. Thus, not a competition but enmity developed between two major figures in Russian science. Such enmity even reached the point where they refused to shake hands or speak when they met. (Puusepp, 1936: 201)

Parties, literature and literary criticism

The above-mentioned Party of People’s Freedom (the Kadets) was composed of members such as the geologist V. I. Vernadsky, the historian A. A. Kiesewetter, the lawyer N. A. Gredeskul, the philosopher S. L. Frank, V. D. Nabokov (the father of Vladimir Nabokov), and many, many other intellectuals. But that does not mean that other participants in the political spectrum did not enroll intellectuals in their ranks – ‘They [the Kadets] considered intelligentsia as a “salt of the Russian earth”, claimed that the future lies in the hands of intelligentsia’ (Gusev, 1985: 37). The expression ‘Kadet-ridden professor’ [kadetstvuyushchii professor] has become a household word (ibid.).

The right-wing political force known as the ‘Union of the Russian People’ [Soyuz Russkogo Naroda] was organized due to the help and moral support of A. A. Maikov, whose father A. N. Maikov was a famous poet. The famous Russian historian and Slavist – A. I. Sobolevsky – was also in that union. More than 70 per cent of the members of the other political party – the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (Esery or Esers) – also were intellectuals. The famous sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) was in that party for a short period.

The role that literature (as well as literary criticism) played in Russian thought and society was tremendous. Writers and poets, philosophers and journalists played the role of political leaders and speakers. Such an atmosphere was particularly tense in periods of serious political events. Probably such a background can explain why the young L. S. Vygotsky began as a literary critic in 1915, when the Great War was erasing empires from the European map. His analysis of Hamlet is not just a trivial work on Shakespeare. In it Vygotsky tried to analyse the play as such ‘out of all historical-literary and biographical … hypotheses’ (Ivanov, 1968: 525). An attempt to understand himself – that is a trigger that drives a person in the period of cataclysms, where ‘the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known’ (IV.v.101–2). In 1917–19 he experienced a real and deep worldview crisis – ‘before the February revolution [1917] and even after it, L. S. Vygotsky was in opposition to socialism, he criticized Marx's philosophy’ (Zavershneva, 2013: 113). We may assume here that Vygotsky was rather critical of the ‘vulgar’ interpretation of Marxism of that period, where many (who would say they ‘correctly understood the situation’) tried to use this ideology as a folding screen being at the same time anti-Marxist and hence – anti-Soviet. But Vygotsky was not a person of that type:

In his writings, we find the standard phrases of Marx, Engels and Lenin that were required from intellectuals at the time, but there is also an attempt at genuine theorizing from Marxist premises … A close friend of Vygotsky has even claimed that after the October Revolution Vygotsky wrote several brochures in each of which he objectively set forth the basic views of different political parties. (van der Veer, 2007: 19)

The move from the provinces to the capital is one side of the coin – the opposite process was also widely evident: during the civil war many intellectuals and scientists left Petrograd and Moscow and migrated to the provinces for the sake of a better life, not to be embroiled in conflicts and suffer starvation. But in 1924 the situation slightly changed and there was nothing unusual in a young and talented person’s starting work in Moscow. Definitely – Vygotsky was assuredly not a person who tried to use Marxism as a folding screen – years of education and previous activity allowed him to ‘read’ the epoch (and people) with the impartiality of a lawyer and with the eloquence and depth of a literary critic.

Forms of cooperation after 1917

In the meantime, history had engendered a motley palette of political forces for application to the Russian social and scientific canvas. The revolutions of 1917 (bourgeois-democratic and socialist) had shuffled the political deck so that yesterday’s scientific and political opponents became merely political … enemies. Living in an era of change can be more painful than the changes themselves. The First World War caused two revolutions; they escalated into the most terrible of wars – into a civil war. The Bolsheviks received an inheritance that would be easier to name as a ‘curse’. The new political leaders fully understood that coping with a new reality is possible via leading rulers of minds – the intellectuals. The latter were not homogeneous in their evaluations of and feelings for the new political order. In 1919 in Petrograd the literary critic and publicist R. I. Ivanov-Razumnik (in collaboration with others) organized Volnaya Filosofskaya Assotsiatsiya [‘The Free Philosophical Association’, Vol’fila]. The poets A. A. Blok and A. Belyi, the writer M. M. Zoshchenko, the philosophers L. Shestov, N. O. Lossky and L. P. Karsavin, the painter K. S. Petrov-Vodkin and many others were enrolled into a new organization, where philosophical and political issues were actively and vividly discussed ( Volnaya Filosofskaya Assotsiatsiya, 2010: 239–41). The members of Vol’fila tried to discuss Marxism as a pure philosophical problem – they even scheduled the organizing of a philosophical congress in 1921, but the shooting of poet H. Gumilyov (Anna Akhmatova’s husband) put an end to such plans – ‘Congresses could not be held at that time!’ claimed one of the organizers A. Z. Shteinberg to his colleague Ivanov-Razumnik ( Volnaya Filosofskaya Assotsiatsiya, 2010: 92). The picture of life at that time was very inconsistent – the newly established Bolsheviks’ government, the ‘old’ intelligentsia, other intellectuals who accepted the new order – ‘reds and whites’, ‘ours and alien’… a polyphony of the social and political in one monstrous choir of voices … Was dialogue feasible? In the period 1921–2 many Russian intellectuals found it possible to publish their works (war and revolutions had significantly reduced, if not totally destroyed, publishing as such). The future founder of the sociology department at Harvard – Pitirim Sorokin – published his ‘System of Sociology’ (in two volumes) in 1921 and slightly later the philosopher E. L. Radlov noted in a conversation with Sorokin – ‘How have you still not been shot yet? … [Y]ou deserved shooting for a few pages of your book, and maybe not just one shot’ (Sorokin, 1991: 147).

Sorokin also made a ‘joke’ in response to Radlov – ‘If they execute me, let it be deservedly’ (Sorokin, 1991: 147). The professor of law at Moscow University B. P. Vysheslavtsev wrote to his colleague A. S. Yashchenko in Berlin in 1922:

I am going to leave here [Russia] and I have heard that you are organizing a university in Berlin. If yes, so keep me in mind. You can hardly eat caviar, sturgeon and ham and grouse, and drink great wine of all specific varieties in Berlin. But we can do that here sometimes, though I am not working anywhere but still existing fantastically by my last year honorariums. ( Russkiy Berlin, 1983: 258–9)

His words could be understood but it would be hard to accept them. The government was also unable to accept the tone of such speeches and declarations. Thus – in the period of 1917–22 – an enormous number of representatives of the ‘old’ intelligentsia was forced to leave the country (voluntarily or having been exiled).

The organization of science

Each war and revolution inter alia hit the organization of science hardest; if in peacetime scientists or academics live in privileged conditions, so such dramatic social and political changes could not spare them. The Soviet authorities fully understood the real value of scientific workers. At the end of 1919 a decree was issued ‘On the Improvement of the Situation of Scientific Workers’. A few months later (winter 1920) the so-called ‘academic ration’ [akademicheskiy paek] was introduced as a direct remedy to help improve the conditions of starving scientists (Ivanova, 1980: 179–80). The above-mentioned decree also released scientists from all forms of duties and services (e.g. military, labor). In 1920–1 respectively in Petrograd and Moscow ‘commissions for improvement of living conditions of scientists’ (Russian abbreviation ‘Kubu’, or later ‘Cekubu’ – ‘Central Commission’) had been organized to help scientists (scientific workers, university academicians, museum workers, etc.) in their living conditions and to improve their economic life (e.g. a system of bonuses for work, payment of salary arrears and other measures). In other words – it was imperative to create a social security system that by all possible means would stop the loss of scientists.

The new authorities tried to improve the situation in education and in the organization of science – their aim was ‘to serve the cause of education of the new, extended by the revolution, workers-and-peasants’ intelligentsia’ (‘Ot redakcii’, 1924: 5). That was published in the ‘Editor’s Notice’ in the first number of the famous literary journal Zvezda [The Star] that was founded in 1924.

In winter 1920–1 at the 1st Party Conference on public education the deputy minister of education M. N. Porkovsky presented a program of a ‘selection of scientific workers among young people graduating from higher schools’ (cited from Ivanova, 1980: 248). Young people without a special university education could be selected for special courses in social sciences – to train them as university instructors. It was a quite effective package of measures to improve the catastrophic situation in the higher schools.

History of Soviet psychology: A strategic language use

It would be interesting to be able to demonstrate how the situation of emigration and exile in 1922 had been reflected in later Soviet psychology. The change from a hardly possible dialogue to a dominative monologue (in Bakhtinian terms) might be illustrated by an example from A. V. Petrovsky’s (1967) Istoriya Sovetskoi Psikhologii [History of Soviet Psychology] – the first book meant for students of this subject. Published in 1967 – on the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution – Petrovsky’s book, by its style and manner of interpretation, is a very clear example of the disruption of dialogue:

New, cut-throat, and – it has to be said – the last open attack against materialism – the philosophical idealistic reaction began almost on a drumbeat in 1922. It was less than a year after the new economic politics was introduced – but the philosophical arms-bearers of capitalism had already started a new crusade against Marxism. (Petrovsky, 1967: 46; emphases added)

But the next excerpt from the same source (Petrovsky) shows another possiblity for disrupting the dialogue by using a biological lexicon: ‘Being totally defeated in an open clash with the new ideology, idealism tries to find varied loopholes, uses dodgy ways of disguise and mimicry to provide the same reactional goals’ (Petrovsky, 1967: 47; emphases added).

The reader (mainly a student) gets a whole raft of biological and de-personificated personified images about the opposite (i.e. anti-Soviet) point of view: a besieged camp of warriors who fight – whether against philosophers or against biological creatures. ‘The 1920s is the time when Freudism in the western world starts its attack on the many sections of the ideological front … The muddy waters of psychoanalytical elements are splashing around Soviet psychology and philosophy’ (Petrovsky, 1967: 84).

The history of the last century has been full of events that have always been described only in superlative terms – whether ‘the most tragic’ or ‘the greatest’ – and a paradox is that often we are talking about the same event. Such dethronement, such transformation, is more clearly perceivable in dramatic historical events – they are like turning points of development – where the essence of the process is exposed and presented in its entirety – all the details of human everyday life are getting a new symbolic meaning – and not only existing in terms of UP and DOWN but also are being considered in the OLD <> NEW dichotomy.

Right people at the right place

Returning to developments in the 1920s, the intelligentsia could feel itself a winner after the February revolution in 1917 – ‘Its enemy the monarchy surrendered and the nation was delivered from the control of the Imperial administration’ (Zernov, 1963: 309) but the following October revolution had shattered Russian society. The country had changed its symbols and begun to sing the Marseillaise and the Internationale with the appeal to build a new society in place of everything old – we are nothing, but let us be all.

The new leaders clearly understood that control over human minds lay in control over the rulers of minds, but the latter were not so unanimous in their support for the newly established order of the Bolshevik party. The water flowed through the diverse and complex body of the Russian intelligentsia – one part sympathized with Bolsheviks, another part hated them as much as it hated all the mentioned sympathizers:

They hated us we because we voluntarily went to work with the Soviets. Hated us because we wanted to raise radiology to the level at which it rightfully should be. They hated us, because at this time of famine and starvation, hatred was a general expression of despair. Exhausted, hungry people become annoyed by every alien initiative, reminding them that they themselves face the force of circumstances mired in painful worries about potatoes or about a piece of bread. ( Organizaciya nauki, 1968: 240)

We have mentioned above that Vygotsky was too young to be enrolled in the pre-revolutionary ideological struggle and was too ‘provincial’ for that. Probably, such a ‘temporal’ factor was crucial in the determination of his being apart from ‘capital storms’ and not being labeled as part of the ‘old intelligentsia’. In a time when great storms of change had an impact on all old institutions and scientific centers – it became easy for a young person from the provinces to enter science without any pre-revolutionary ‘baggage’. We might add here that an implication of not having such ‘baggage’ is that Vygotsky did not have any special psychological education, he was not burdened ‘with traditions of empirical “academic” psychology’ (Yaroshevsky, 1985: 499), but he was in the right place at the right time; for him, the only answer to Hamlet’s everlasting question was – to be!