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Raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
classes contributed to the formation of another sociocultural identity, the
intelligentsia, which has remained an ‘institution’ of Russian society to the
present day.
15
On-going scholarly research shows that the conceptual and historical reality
of the intelligentsia, no less than that of the raznochintsy, cannot be subordi-
nated to any single collective meaning.
16
Historians situate ‘the origins of the
Russian intelligentsia’ in a variety of social milieus: the educated and increas-
ingly disaffected service nobility of the eighteenth century; the idealist philo-
sophical circles that formed around the universities, salons and ‘thick’ journals
of the 1830s–40s; and finally, the radical raznochintsy and nihilist movement of
the 1860s.
17
One historian counts over sixty definitions of the ‘intelligentsia’ in
the scholarship of the former Soviet Union, the most common being a social
group composed of individuals ‘professionally employed in mental labour’.
Echoing the official classifications of Soviet society, this definition equates the
intelligentsia with the technically specialised professions of modern times.
18
Clearly, the possibilities for definition and redefinition are numerous. Suffice
it to say that any effort to summarise or critically evaluate the massive histo-
riography on the intelligentsia can hardly do justice to the complexity of the
phenomenon or the diligence of its scholars.
15 On the continuity of the intelligentsia ‘counterculture’, see J. Burbank, ‘Were the Russian
Intelligenty Organic Intellectuals?’ in L. Fink, S. T. Leonard and D. M. Reid (eds.), Intel-
lectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1996), pp. 97–120.
16 As a collective term, intelligentsia appeared in Russia from the 1830s to the 1860s.
Wirtschafter, Structures of Society,pp.101–2, 125–33; O. Muller, Intelligencija. Untersuchungen
zurGeschichteeines politischenSchlagwortes (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1971); and most recently
S. O. Shmidt, ‘K istorii slova “intelligentsiia”’, reprinted in Obshchestvennoe samosoznanie
rossiiskogo blagorodnogo sosloviia, XVII–pervaia tret’ XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), pp.
300–9.
17 I provide here only a handful of references. M. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia:
The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966); M. Malia,
Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1961); D. Brower, ‘The Problem of the Russian Intelligentsia’, SR 26 (1967): 638–47;
D. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1975); A. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to
Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979); V.
Nahirny, ‘The Russian Intelligentsia: From Men of Ideas to Men of Convictions’, Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 4 (1962): 403–35; V. Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia:
From Torment to Silence (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983). For fuller historio-
graphic treatment, see Wirtschafter, Structures of Society,pp.93–150; Wirtschafter, Social
Identity,pp.86–99.
18 S. I. Khasanova, ‘K voprosu ob izuchenii intelligentsii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii’, in G.
N. Vul’fson (ed.), Revoliutsionno-osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v XIX–XX vv. v Povolzh’e i Pri-
ural’e (Kazan: Izd. Kazanskogo universiteta, 1974), pp. 37–54; V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia,
‘Formirovanie raznochinskoi intelligentsii v Rossii v 40-kh godakh XIX v.’, Istoriia SSSR
(1958)no.1: 83–104; V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX
veka (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971).
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