The Renaissance of the Russian Intelligentsia

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IT IS ironic that in the recent events in Poland and Hungary a leading rôle was played by one of the most favored and privileged groups in Communist society, the intellectuals. It was the students who led the Hungarians into combat and provided the most active element wherever else in the Soviet bloc echoes of the Hungarian and Polish experience were heard. It is also ironic that this agitation occurred at a time when many social theorists in the West had all but concluded that Soviet intimidation and indoctrination made uprisings of the 1848 variety impossible in Communist lands. Clearly, some reappraisal is in order of the rôle of the intellectual class in Eastern Europe. For the student of international affairs such an examination should perhaps focus on two questions: What is the nature of the ferment among intellectuals in the U.S.S.R. itself? What is its political significance?

Since at least mid-1953, Soviet writers have been actively seeking greater liberty, attempting through both their writings and their public meetings to limit the authority of their Party supervisors. The Party's difficulties in sustaining controls in the post-Stalin era became evident when it proved unable to define a firm line at the Writers' Congress in December 1954. The situation worsened in the summer of 1956 when a number of heterodox works by formerly purged writers began to appear in literary journals and when Questions of History, the leading historical journal, pressed its campaign to reëxamine the Soviet past and "reëvaluate the bourgeois historical legacy" in the face of direct Party criticism. By early 1957, the régime was confronted with direct attacks on the long-sacred doctrine of "socialist realism" both in the review Questions of Philosophy and at the Ukrainian Writers' Congress.

Even more alarming than these manifestations of discontent was the fact that the older generation of disaffected intellectuals had apparently been joined by a large segment of the student population, which was both more important to the régime and more outspoken in criticizing it. Students appear to have played a leading rôle in the Georgian riots of March 1956; and young students and technologists figured large in Pravda's denunciation in April 1956 of "degenerate" excesses in the campaign of de-Stalinization...