Question of the Soviet intelligentsia.

J. V. Stalin

Report on the Work of the Central Committee to the Eighteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.)

(Delivered March 10, 1939.)

Works, Vol. 14

The second question is that of the Soviet intelligentsia.

On this question, too, as on the question of the state, there is a certain unclearness and confusion among Party members.

In spite of the fact that the position of the Party on the question of the Soviet intelligentsia is perfectly clear, there are still current in our Party views hostile to the Soviet intelligentsia and incompatible with the Party position. As you know, those who hold these views practise a disdainful and contemptuous attitude to the Soviet intelligentsia and regard it as an alien force, even as a force hostile to the working class and the peasantry. True, during the period of Soviet development the intelligentsia has undergone a radical change both in its composition and status. It has come closer to the people and is honestly collaborating with the people, in which respect it differs fundamentally from the old, bourgeois intelligentsia. But this apparently means nothing to these comrades. They go on harping on the old tunes and wrongly apply to the Soviet intelligentsia views and attitudes which were justified in the old days when the intelligentsia was in the service of the landlords and capitalists.

In the old days, under capitalism, before the revolution, the intelligentsia consisted primarily of members of the propertied classes - noblemen, manufacturers, merchants, kulaks and so on. Some members of the intelligentsia were sons of small tradesmen, petty officials, and even of peasants and workingmen, but they did not and could not play a decisive part.

The intelligentsia as a whole depended for their livelihood on the propertied classes and ministered to the propertied classes. Hence it is easy to understand the mistrust, often bordering on hatred, with which the revolutionary elements of our country and above all the workers regarded the intellectuals. True, the old intelligentsia produced some courageous individuals, handfuls of revolutionary people who adopted the standpoint of the working class and completely threw in their lot with the working class. But such people were all too few among the intelligentsia, and they could not change the complexion of the intelligentsia as a whole.

Matters with regard to the inteliigentsia have undergone a fundamental change, however, since the October Revolution, since the defeat of the foreign armed intervention, and especially since the victory of industrialization and collectivization, when the abolition of exploitation and the firm establishment of the Socialist economic system made it really possible to give the country a new constitution and to put it into effect. The most influential and qualified section of the old intelligentsia broke away from the main body in the very first days of the October Revolution, proclaimed war on the Soviet government, and joined the ranks of the saboteurs. They met with welldeserved punishment for this; they were smashed and dispersed by the organs of Soviet power. Subsequently the majority of those that survived were recruited by the enemies of our country as wreckers and spies, and thus were expunged by their own deeds from the ranks of the intellectuals. Another section of the old intelligentsia, less qualified but more numerous, long continued to mark time, waiting for "better days"; but then, apparently giving up hope, decided to go and serve and to live in harmony with the Soviet government.

The greater part of this group of the old intelligentsia are well on in years and are beginning to go out of commission. A third section of the old intelligentsia, mainly comprising its rank-and-file, and still less qualified than the section just mentioned, joined forces with the people and supported the Soviet government. It needed to perfect its education, and it set about doing so in our universities. But parallel with this painful process of differentiation and breakup of the old intelligentsia there went on a rapid process of formation, mobilization and mustering of forces of a new intelligentsia. Hundreds of thousands of young people coming from the ranks of the working class, the peasantry and the working intelligentsia entered the universities and technical colleges, from which they emerged to reinforce the attenuated ranks of the intelligentsia. They infused fresh blood into it and reanimated it in a new, Soviet spirit. They radically changed the whole aspect of the intelligentsia, moulding it in their own form and image. The remnants of the old intelligentsia were dissolved in the new, Soviet intelligentsia, the intelligentsia of the people.

There thus arose a new, Soviet intelligentsia, intimately bound up with the people and, for the most part, ready to serve them faithfully and loyally.

As a result, we now have a numerous, new, popular, Socialist intelligentsia, fundamentally different from the old, bourgeois intelligentsia both in composition and in social and political character.

The old theory about the intelligentsia, which taught that it should be treated with distrust and combated, fully applied to the old, pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, which served the landlords and capitalists.

This theory is now out-of-date and does not fit our new, Soviet intelligentsia. Our new intelligentsia demands a new theory, a theory teaching the necessity for a cordial attitude towards it, solicitude and respect for it, and cooperation with it in the interests of the working class and the peasantry.

That is clear, I should think.

It is therefore all the more astonishing and strange that after all these fundamental changes in the status of the intelligentsia people should be found within our Party who attempt to apply the old theory, which was directed against the bourgeois intelligentsia, to our new, Soviet intelligentsia, which is basically a Socialist intelligentsia. These people, it appears, assert that workers and peasants who until recently were working in Stakhanov fashion in the factories and collective farms and who were then sent to the universities to be educated, thereby ceased to be real people and became second-rate people. So we are to conclude that education is a pernicious and dangerous thing. (Laughter.) We want all our workers and peasants to be cultured and educated, and we shall achieve this in time. But in the opinion of these queer comrades, this purpose harbours a grave danger; for after the workers and peasants become cultured and educated they may face the danger of being classified as secondrate people. (Loud laughter.) The possibility is not precluded that these queer comrades may in time sink to the position of extolling backwardness, ignorance, benightedness and obscurantism. It would be quite in the nature of things. Theoretical vagaries have never led, and never can lead, to any good.

Such is the position with regard to our new, Socialist intelligentsia.