The Soviet Intelligentsia

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IT might be supposed that as a result of so many years of Stalinist conditioning the new Soviet man would be a new creature, as different from his Western counterpart as the Soviet system differs from Western forms of government. But this has not, in fact, turned out to be so. In so far as recent conversations of mine with students, clerks in shops, taxi-drivers and stray acquaintances of all sorts can convey a just impression, the result is a kind of arrested infantile development, not a different kind of maturity.

In the Soviet Union today one finds the conditions that are often found to prevail in organizations in which degrees and types of responsibility are very sharply defined--strictly disciplined schools, armies or other rigid hierarchies in which the differences between the governors and the governed are extremely precise. Indeed, the chasm between the governors and the governed is the deepest single division noticeable in Soviet society; and when one speaks to Soviet citizens it soon becomes quite clear to which of the two groups they belong. Honest public discussion, either of the ends for the sake of which the new society supposedly exists, or of the more important means supposedly adopted for the forwarding of those ends, is equally discouraged on both sides of this great dividing line. The work of the ant-hill must be done, and anything that wastes time or creates doubts cannot be permitted. But the consequences in one case are somewhat different from those in the other...