From dissidents to collaborators: the resurgence and demise of the Russian critical intelligentsia since 1985

This paper investigates the multifaceted universe of Russian intelligentsia and addresses the following, troubling, questions: What caused pro-democratic political dissent to weaken among the intelligentsia in the aftermath of perestrojka? Why has the young generation of Russian public intellectuals undergone a radical metamorphosis of their value system and plunged into political passivity and conformism? Freedom has historically been a prima facie value for the Russian liberal intelligentsia. By the mid-1990s, however, much of the intelligentsia came to be associated not with advocacy of individual liberty and human rights but with the failure of liberal democracy in Russia. This paper focuses on how the generation of the 1960s liberal intelligentsia, or shestidesjatniki, who played an active role during perestrojka, gave way to a generation of the “sons,” who, characterized as Western-style intellectuals, became spin doctors and political technologists, replacing the original ideals and high moral stance of their predecessors with nihilistic nonchalance. It is argued that the demise of dissent in post-Soviet Russia derives from the younger generation of intellectuals’ view of the attainment of political power by the generation of shestidesjatniki during perestrojka and the first El’tsin term as the latter’s moral fall and abandonment of the intelligentsia’s traditional role as an outside critic of the state.     

Georgii Shakhnazarov and the Soviet Critique of Historical Materialism

The emergence of ideological and political pluralism in the Soviet Union during 1990 led to a growing number of critiques of Marxism-Leninism. The development of the internal Soviet critique of orthodox Soviet Marxism-Leninism culminated in the publication of a two-part article by Georgii Shakhnazarov in Kommunist in 1991. In this article Shakhnazarov outlined a comprehensive critique of orthodox historical materialism, and many of the ideas he developed became a central part of the Draft Party Programme of July/August 1991. This programme amounted to the virtual social-democratisation of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. The collapse of Soviet Marxism-Leninism can in part be explained by the internal critique of its basic tenets which developed in the period after 1988.     

The good vs. “the own”: moral identity of the (post-)Soviet Lithuania

What is the meaning of perestrojka? There is no doubt that it led to the end of the Cold War and had a huge impact on the international situation. Nevertheless, there is no consensus as to the outcomes of perestrojka. Perestrojka brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. This fact might be interpreted positively: it opened the possibility to restore historical truth and to create independent democratic states. From another perspective, it can be conceived negatively as a destruction of the integrity of the Soviet Union and the loss of a part of the territory as well as the economy of Russia (according to the President of the Gorba?ev Foundation, Viktor Kuvaldin, during the conference “Revisiting Perestroika—Processes and Alternatives”). Perestrojka has no one definite general meaning, but it has a very specific one for Lithuania. In this paper I ask: What is the meaning of perestrojka for contemporary Lithuania and for post-Soviet life? Was perestrojka a failure or a success? I approach perestrojka from a moral point of view, suggesting that the perestrojka made possible a fundamental choice between several alternatives. Once the choice was made the specificity of future goals and evaluation of the past opened up. I concentrate on the moral value of the act of accommodation (and resistance) to the Soviet regime, on the conflict of values represented by the “nation’s own” and the goodness of the political order, and on the role of freedom and determinism in history. Immanuel Kant’s conception of duty and the categorical imperative is used as a model for the analysis of the situation of choice.