Most of the Soviet "middle class," to which the intelligentsia belonged, was lumpenized when their savings were wiped out in 1992. They're too busy selling hot dogs in kiosks to adopt any kind of serious oppositional stance. A university professor in Russia makes about $50 a month (officially, anyway; there's also taking bribes and backdoor lessons and tutoring exams to New Russians and using your car as a taxi and hawking fast food and so on and so on).
There is a class of what I suppose you could call "house intellectuals" who work for the government (ex-Trotskyist Glab Pavlovsky and his Center for Effective Politics come to mind) or various political movements or think tanks supported by sundry backers. All the parties have their professional intellectuals and ideologues. I.e., they're either committed ideologues or whores.
A great way to be an intellectual and still get cash is to become pro-Western -- a tried and true moneymaker that goes back to the USSR, when any halfwit could defect, portray himself as a "dissident" and start getting feted as a great fighter for freedom (I could name names, but I don't want to get in trouble). If you are a Russian intellectual who starts aping the US government's line, you get invited to cushy junkets in Washington, DC, where you can blather on endlessly at colloquia on crap about which you know nothing in between trips to the bar to get sloshed. The Americans will put you in the "enlightened Russian" class because you say you agree with them, and you get extra creds b/c of your citizenship.
One person who has carried himself admirably, though I don't agree with him on virtually everything, is Solzhenitsyn. He has been unsparing in his criticism.
By the way, in Russia Solzhenitsyn is considered to be a very, very bad writer, as well as a pompous ass.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal -------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 15:35:53 +0000 From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Subject: Re: marxist sociology
>Perhaps, Justin and Chris Doss might wish to do us the favor of analyzing
>the political role of Russian academics and intellectuals in the
>post-soviet era. I get the
>impression that many of them have simply continued to play the role
>of apparatchiks, except instead of kowtowing to diamat and "official
>Marxism"
>they now kowtow to either free market liberalism or to right-wing
>nationalism.
>They seemed for the most part to have been noticeably silent when
>Yeltsin's
>cronies were robbing the country blind, and I am not aware of too much
>significant
>opposition from them to Putin either.
You hit the nail on the head. I actually stopped following those people after I left the academy, they're not interesting in themselves. But as far as I can tell, with some honorable exceptions (Kagarlitsky comes to mind), there's not a lot more to be said about them. jks