Intellectuals in the days of
The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present Boris Kagarlitsky, Translated by Brian Pearce, Verso, 1988, £17.95, hardback. Reviewed by JANE KELLY This book is a fascinating discussion by one of the leading radical intellectuals
New publications reviewed
Revlewed by NICK
ROBIN
In 1982, the US warned the
Micronesian people of the
Marshall Islands not to eat food from the northern part of their atoll. It was not a timely warning.
It had been 28 years since the
USA uninvited - hid exploded a homb 1300 times more powertul than those they"d dropped on Hiroshima or
Nagasaki on Bikini. also in
In that time, as Jane Dibblin recounts in Day of Two Suns
(Virago, E6.95), the
Micronesian people had realised themselves that things weren't quic right as they began dying of unknown cancerous diseases and giving birth to terribly
Dibblin's book - much of it in the words of the islanders themselves - explores the social and political realities of the
US s nuclear testing in the
Pacific in an account both analytical and humanistic. Highly recommended.
REVIEWS in the Soviet Union, of the history of the relationship between intellectuals and the state from 1917 to the present day.
Iris a powerful and vibrant book, which charts the situation after 1917, the rise of Stalin and the imposition of Soviet Socialist Realism, the partial chaw" under Khruschey, and the disiflusionment in the 1970s. It ends with an urgent plen to the present-lay intellectuals to take up the challenge offerco by glasnost; to move on from exposure of the horrors of Stalin to develop a positive way forward to
The bombings continue in the. Pacific: Kwajelein, another island, is the US base where star wars was dreamed up, and is host now to the major testing of SDI initiatives... It should, therefore, get a mention in Reshaping the US Left, edited by Mike Davis and Michael Sprinkler (Verso, £9.95) but it
This points to a weakness in this otherwise praiseworthy volume of essays from the US Tar left - the insularity of its concorns (the opcning essay on building solidarity with the Central American revolution being the exception).
Reshaping the US Leftis the thind annual collection of a vory uselul series called The Year Left, and takes as its subjoct what the American left like to call movement building
The book is eclectic, offering
12 participant-observer perspectives on key struggles and developments of the revitalised
Us lett, but none the worse for that. If at time the essays scem a Title local in their purview, this at allows us to see the detail of some of the many real struggies which are the well-Kept secret of
Besides, many are stimulatIng accounts, full of thought-
Glasnost
socialism. Buticalso contains some of the contradictions of the cconomic and political refonn movement which gave birth to it.
Without glasmost this book is unlikely to have been written; hur the effects of perestroika - speed-up, higher prices, attacks on the historic gains of the working class of cheap housing etc. - are not mentioned. Indeed Kagarfitsky uses the two words as though they were synonomous. and here we reach the other problem with the book. Alongside the history of the relationship of Soviet mtellectuals to the state goes a theoretical discussion on the role of intelprovoking and often novel idcas of organising which could be ex perimented with here. Perhaps next year's volume will bend the stick the other way and include ideas of an overall socialist perspective for the Dukakis years.
Another book which goes closc-up.on building coalitions is Radical Records: thirty vears of lesbian and guy history! edited by Bob Cant and Susan Hemmings (Routledge, (7.95). This claims to be the first history book by lesbians and gay men, and takes a distinctly leftist editorial line.
Contrbutions are varied, hut all concerned in one way or another with the political movement of lesbians and gay men, and the ways in which the dialectic of self organisation and mass struggle has worked in
Without exception the starting point for these essays is the lived experience of the writers; this confers personalily on the writing which makes it both im mediate and (usually) easy to
Coming out during the gay community's health crisis and the Clause 2% hacklash. It is a timcly book.
lectuals, their function in the party, and their class position. This discussion is more con tused. If this review concentrates critically on this question, it should not be road as a sweeping condemnation of flie hook sa whole: which gives many insights on the process of change in the Soviet Union today. but as pre example of the problems faced by writers (and others) in the Soviet Linion, so long denied material and the right to open discussion to enable them to form a complete understanding of their
Throughout the mineteenth and into the twentieth century the Russian intelligentsia played a central role in the struggle for hourgenis democratic freedoms. but only a small minority joined the Bolshevik party. Others aligned themseives to the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries or the Kadets. The division of the intelligentsia betwoon contending classes, Was sharpened during the Civil War, when: Part of the intelligentsin adhered to the Bolsheviks, many joined the Whites: the majority tried to find some third way That is a path that steered between bourgeois reaction and proletarian dictatorship. KagarJitsky argues that the suppres sion of bourgeois-democratic frocdoms dealt a heavy blew to the intellectuals who had placed their hopes in a free Russia, The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the terror and the introduction of censorship were actions that the left-wing intelligentsia could not excuse under any conditions. Although the author accepts that the objeetive conditions of isolatich. cconomic collapse, invasion cic, meant that censorship and atlacks on democratic rights were probably inevitabic, in order lo save the revolution, he emphasises that it was tragedy for the intellectuals. and one which the Bolsheviks failed to understand. Indeed the implication is that it was this. division betwcen the intelligentsia and the Bolsheviks on the question of democracy, albeit a result of impossible circumstances, that led inexorably to increased burcaucracy and to the
rise of Stalin. The problem that this raises, to which Kagarlitsky returns to throughout the book, 1s the pole and function of intellectuals, their relationship to the workmg class to the party, and especially theirclass position. He argues that contrary to Stalin's definition of the intelligentsia as a Stralum" rather than a class which is therefore unable to play an independent mie in social life. the 'many millioned intelligentsia. in the Soviet Umion today has become an independent social stratumi, capahle not only of formulating its aims but often of achieving them.' Further he maintains that while in the nineteenth. md carly this century the intelligentsia, both East and West 'was bourgeors: (or pelly-bourgeois) in the way it got its income present circumstances (though for different reasons the intelligenisia both East and West have been "proletarianised". The Sovict intelligentsia. Terling that they belong to the oppressed and expioned masscs. incrcasingly Claim the right to speak in their name. He thus adopts a position whereby the intelligentsin are both an independent stratum and being tured into simple proletarians The confusion stenis partly, I feel. Irom his desire for the intelligentsia to play a loading role in the changes. But this desirc, despite the role played by a few. very courgeous individuals in the past, goes agains the history of the intelligentsia. East and West. Marxists have traditionally argued. they hire an intermediate pertybourgeois layer and can therefore alien themselves with either the working class or the bourgeoise) and insist upon the leading role of the working class Indeed Kagarltsky himselt, as the Co-ordinator of the Federation of Socialist Clubs, gives an example ofthe divided nature of the intelligentsia when he points to intellectuals leading right wing clubs with antidemocratic and anti-semitie politics - Pamvat and Rodina Memory and Homeland) - as well as ich wing clubs.
The relation of the intelligenisia to the working class is not just an abstract question.