[lbo-talk] Gorbachev: I Should Have Left the Communist Party Earlier

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 18 12:08:41 PDT 2011


Joanna: "Right, but this intelligentia was not created from scratch; they were mostly the educated children of a former privileged layer."

[WS:] I guess it depends on the country. What you are talking may be true for Romania and perhaps Hungary, but certainly not for other EE countries. Czechoslovakia had a relatively sizable pre- WW2 intelligentsia, but they tended to be progressive. In any case, Czechoslovakia did not have much domestic upper class at least since 1620. In Poland, otoh, pre-war intelligentsia was rather small (Poland was predominantly rural) and most of it perished in WW2 - so it is certainly true that post war intelligentsia was created by the Communists from the scratch. This is also true for Russia. Pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was rather small to begin with, and whatver was left of it after the revolution was really a drop in a bucket comparing to the vast number of college graduates produced by the Soviet higher educational system.

PS. sorry for the wrong attribution of the original quote.

Wojtek



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