The Destructive Intelligentsia

Another quote from John Gray:

Parallels between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia and the early twenty-first-century West may seem far-fetched. Their histories are very different. . . Liberalism did not die in Russia. It was never born. Yet the similarities are real. Late tsarism and the late liberal West produced an intelligentsia that attacked the society that nurtured them. Both were under attack from within.

Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (p. 57). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

There is a real difference, though. The intelligentsia of the Tsarist Russian Empire saw terrible things in the society it demolished. A police state. The absolutely horrid and subhuman existence of the peasantry. The Pale of Settlement and pogroms, which impacted the many Jewish intellectuals personally. The destruction of the non-Russian languages, which impacted the many Ukrainian intellectuals personally.

Life was. . . maybe not particularly short in comparison with other countries but definitely nasty and brutish. The Tsarist intelligentsia was rebelling against a state that was vastly inferior to the American, British, or French states of that time. Anybody who was not a complete animal or a congenital moron supported the revolution against the Tsarist regime.

The Western intelligentsia is in a very different situation. Their problems are pinpricks in comparison. They enjoy the best conditions for intellectual pursuits ever known to humanity by far. Their society truly nurtures them. The Tsarist intelligentsia ended up creating an absolute horror with their revolution but these intellectuals had never been nurtured like today’s Western ones are.

Now we know that Tsarism was definitely better than Stalinism or even Brezhnevism. But at least those intellectuals destroyed their society for a reason. It doesn’t make anything better or bring back any of the victims but at least you can kind of sympathize with it.

So I get Gray’s analogy but it’s not altogether correct.