Come to think of it, there's a point I would like to make. The Soviet intelligentsia was not the Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century or the Silver Age -- the Akhmatovas and Chaadaevs and Berdyaevs and so forth. That social stratum, the intelligentsia proper, the people for whom the word was invented, was wiped out by the events of the early to mid 20th century (maybe it's a stratum that can only exist in a feudal society). The Soviet intelligentsia was a self-identified group of middling-educated people who glommed onto the mystique of the earlier intelligentsia because it made them feel special and more deserving. (Note that intelligentsia does not mean intellectuals. Sakharov and Zinoviev were intellectuals. They were not members of the intelligentsia.)
--- On Wed, 6/17/09, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Exploited? Oh please. The soviet intelligentsia were full
> of complaints, but the essence of them was that they were
> not accorded their proper place in the nomenklatura. In
> fact, that is all the intelligentsia was, those educated for
> positions in the nomenklatura, who, for whatever reason, did
> not find a position there. Never were there such a
> mean-spirited, superior, disdainful gang of snobs as the
> Soviet intelligentsia. They hated the workers, who they
> blamed for being over-paid and greedy, taking their rightful
> due from them (which of course was not true).
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