Flights of the Intelligentsia
There is a French-themed café in the center of Riga called Vivien. But when a Russian emigre friend posted photos from its opening, his caption read: “It’s like ten years ago – I am at a new Jean-Jacques”. My reaction: oh no, not that again. Having left Moscow for Riga after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, I felt chased and cornered by a ghost—the ghost of Russian intelligentsia.
Disguised under a pseudonym, Vivien indeed turned out to be a reincarnation of Jean-Jacques, an old Moscow haunt that grew into a formidable chain since its opening in 2004. Jean-Jacques outlets were made to look like Parisian cafés with maroon-colored doors and bar stands, dark vintage furniture and—a trademark feature—paper tablecloths that patrons were invited to draw on with pencils provided by the establishment. A Jean-Jacques (named, of course, after Rousseau) would be typically paired with a John Donne, a somewhat darker and edgier English pub. The name choices reflected the intellectual and geopolitical leanings of the owners and their clientele: West European humanism.
Over the years, the Jean-Jacques brand became so synonymous with Russian liberal intelligentsia that Kremlin propaganda began using it as a derogatory term to describe the entire anti-Putin opposition. “Russia is bigger than Jean-Jacques,” RT founder Margarita Simonyan declared in 2012 as the Kremlin attempted to marginalize the Bolotnaya protest movement. When Putin ordered a clampdown on those protests in May of that year, riot police raided the original Jean-Jacques on Nikitsky Boulevard, beating up and arresting the clients. I got arrested in that crackdown, too, albeit a in different location—an event that complemented my decision to leave Russia when it attacked Ukraine in 2014.
The founder—present seemingly every night, drinking with his pals—was Mitya Borisov, a larger-than-life Moscow socialite who hails from a prominent Soviet dissident family linked to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was he who presided over the opening of Café Vivien in Riga. Pictures from the event mostly featured familiar faces from the pre-2022 Jean-Jacques – as it was before the winds of history, namely Russia’s all-out invasion in Ukraine, scattered its clientele in all directions, from Tbilisi to Buenos Aires.
Back in Moscow and in much better times, Borisov’s bars were where I spent a significant part of my young adulthood and received a serious overdose of that strange and unsavory substance: Russian intelligentsia.
I am hardly the only member of the group—let’s admit my affiliation head on—who shares this sentiment. The story of the Russian intelligentsia is that of self-loathing and escapism—from itself as well as from Russia. This is especially poignant now, at the height of Ukraine conflict, which has forced pretty much the entire Russian opposition and civil society to flee the country and hastily reinvent itself abroad, a situation fraught with serious personal risks to those on all sides of the conflict.
In his seminal work on the Bolsheviks The House of Government, UC Berkeley professor Yuri Slezkine describes the Russian intelligentsia as a group that combines “millenarian faith and lifelong learning.” It is the millenarian and apocalyptic worldview that explains its rather inhuman propensity to sacrifice itself in the name of any current political cause. Its flight from Putin’s regime in response to the invasion in Ukraine is one recent example. “I can’t think of any analogy to the mass exodus of one country’s intellectual elite in response to its invasion of another country,” Slezkine pointed out in one of our conversations.
Is there indeed a precedent for the lion’s share of a major world power’s liberal intellectuals fleeing their own country in protest of its unjustified aggression? The Iraq War definitely didn’t prompt the same outcome in the US. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not exactly causing an exodus of intellectuals either.
The causes of this escapism, however, keep changing. From agrarian socialism and Bolshevik totalitarianism, to the Soviet dissident movement and post-Soviet right-wing libertarianism, the intelligentsia keeps trying to build a new church on the ashes of an old, discredited and desecrated temple (no matter if that church denies the existence of God at times—it will still have its martyr saints, holy places and ashes).
In Maxim Gorky’s “The Life of Klim Samgin,” a saga imbued with the author’s loathing of the Russian intelligentsia of which he was part and parcel, one character muses: “In Russia, everyone strives to believe in something. Doesn’t matter what, even in the salutariness of atheism. In Christ. In chemistry. In the nation. The pursuit of faith is the pursuit of the peace of mind. We have no people who condemn themselves to the anxiety of independent thinking.”
The Civilizers
Like the other quintessentially Russian product, vodka, the word “intelligentsia” is a Polish import. Unlike vodka, it is notoriously hard to define. Is it a class, a social group or a vague term that stands for all educated and well-meaning people?
Slezkine describes it as a “particularly vibrant tradition of millenarian sectarianism.” I personally tend to see it as a hereditary caste which perpetually fluctuates between self-sacrificial messianism coupled with inherent subversiveness and—at the very same time—extreme servility that results in a never-ending search for the next strongman to embrace—be it Stalin, Putin, Netanyahu or the anti-Russian NATO adoration club today.
As Gorky’s protagonist Samgin puts it, the intelligentsia is “the country’s best people who take responsibility for all the bad things in it.” Another character warns Samgin against trusting “good Russian people” who believe they can change the fate of society with the power of words but who are destined to be trampled upon by the horses of history that are “driven by experienced but indelicate coachmen.” Tellingly, Gorky himself lived the life of a genuine humanist and democratic socialist, only to end it as an apologist for Stalin and the Gulag.
In its canonical origin myth, the Russian intelligentsia traces its roots to the progressive aristocracy of the early 19th century, which was exemplified by the Decembrists who staged a failed uprising against the tsar in 1825. As Lenin put it, the Decembrists politically awakened the writer Aleksandr Herzen who in turn inspired the Narodniks, the first revolutionary movement made of raznochintsy – educated but not so wealthy people: the original intelligentsia.
One feature of the aristocratic class to which the Decembrists belonged was that it saw itself as a European nation within the much larger nation of semi-Asiatic barbarians. Comprising to a significant extent of Baltic Germans and Western European immigrants, it used French as its primary language of communication and treated the empire’s Slavic peasant majority in much the same way as European colonizers treated African slaves in the Americas.
This two-nation sentiment lingered through centuries and feels even stronger now that the intelligentsia’s opinion leaders are physically detached from Russia. “There are two separate nations living in Russia, totally dissimilar and hostile to each other,” bestselling author Boris Akunin (Chkhartishvili) wrote back in 2013 when he was a prominent figure of Bolotnaya protest – an intelligentsia/middle class movement that failed to rally broader masses in the manner of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. “There is Us and there is Them. We have our own heroes: Chekhov, Mandelshtam, Pasternak, Sakharov. They have theirs: Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky and now Putin.”
No matter how they viewed the masses, no matter the current intellectual celebrity who adorned their banners—Rousseau, Marx or Hayek—members of the Russian intelligentsia have largely retained that self-perception of being agents of civilization in a land of savages. Not any civilization, but specifically that which developed and flourished in Western Europe and North America. The yawning gap between the educated class and common folks isn’t historically unique to Russia, but in Russia, with its peripheral and—occasionally—pariah status in Europe, it would always harbor a geopolitical dimension.
The intelligentsia has tried to erase the boundary dividing them from narod (the people)–a mysterious entity which they either worshipped (if only along the lines of Rousseau’s noble savage) or despised, depending on historical circumstances and political views. The core political method of the Narodniks, for instance, was called Going to the People, encouraging members of the intelligentsia to live with peasant communities and spread revolutionary ideas among them.
Although Marx and Engels relentlessly criticized Herzen for perceived pan-Slavism, even his breakup with the icons of radical political thought in Western Europe highlighted the Westernizing zeal of the revolutionary intelligentsia in Russia. In an article penned on Herzen’s 100-year anniversary in the ominous year of 1917, Leon Trotsky compared the Slavophile tendencies of the Narodniks to a photo negative: “light instead of shades and shades instead of light! – a reflection of the superiority and might of the European culture in the anxious mind of a Russian man”.
The Bolsheviks were Russia’s most radical Westernizers albeit in the most unhinged way, given their Westernization project resulted in isolation from the West. They claimed to be pursuing the “dictatorship of proletariat”, but in reality they built a dictatorship of a radical and ethnically mixed intelligentsia group which succeeded in destroying the former empire’s largest social class by far, the peasantry, through the policies of genocidal terror and artificially induced famines.
While it was also subject to terror, the intelligentsia mushroomed enormously during the Soviet years, thanks to the Bolsheviks’ obsession with education. This stratum was now largely made of the beneficiaries of the revolution who came from the lower social classes and ethnic minorities from the western fringes of the former empire: Jews, Latvians and Poles. But it manifested much the same features as its predecessor, including the combustible mixtures of elitism and servility that alternated with subversiveness and self-sacrifice. Over 70 years of Soviet power it drifted from being the intellectual locomotive of the Bolshevik movement towards the dissidence of the 1960-70s and ended up leading the drive to topple the Communist regime—its very own brainchild—in 1991.
The new political religion that replaced the Bolshevik totalitarian project was the worship of the West per se, which meant recognizing not just its political and economic predominance, but also its moral and spiritual supremacy. The prime minister who unleashed the brutal shock therapy to reform the socialist economy along of the lines of Western free market orthodoxy—an effort now blamed for causing extreme poverty and rapid demographic decline—was Yegor Gaidar, the grandson of a ruthless Red Guard commander who evolved into a celebrated children’s writer and a founder of a prominent intelligentsia family.
Incentives for conversion to the occidental church were not entirely spiritual though. American and European institutions became a lifeline for much of the intelligentsia in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states in the troubled 1990s. This resulted in the emergence of what Western media describe as “civil society.” Left-wing thinkers tend to dismiss it as “comprador intelligentsia”—an intellectual class whose personal interests are often more aligned with the West than with its own nation. Pro-Western liberals would typically claim that it’s in the best interests of their home countries to follow the Western party line. But the dreary reality of life in post-Soviet countries kept undermining that view over and over again, especially as the West set on a self-degrading drift towards far right populism and unhinged militarism.
As a common expression goes, the Russian intelligentsia feels perpetually “unlucky with the people” which so often fails to appreciate its grandiose social experiments like forced collectivization or shock therapy. This disdain was best expressed by pro-democracy politician and Dostoyevsky expert Yury Karyakin during the election night broadcast in 1993. “Russia, you’ve gone mad,” he roared upon learning that Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s far right LDPR was prevailing over Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice party. Another prominent perestroika-era idiom (coined by historian Yury Afanasyev1)—the “aggressively obedient majority”—came to be used as a slur casually thrown at narod. If only its active users knew back at the time how “aggressively obedient” their own intelligentsia caste, the supposedly enlightened minority, would look in the next 35 years. Much like the anti-Trump Americans today, Russian liberals never really bother to look in the mirror as they explain the nation’s unsavory electoral choices.
The new epoch provided multiple ways for members of the intelligentsia to disentangle themselves from this incorrigible nation which reliably fails to live up to their expectations: the simplest was emigrating into the West. But for millions of people, it was the Russian motherland which disentangled itself from them when President Boris Yeltsin signed the Belovezha accords, thereby undoing the Soviet Union in December 1991. That left major intelligentsia hotbeds—Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, Minsk and Almaty—outside the Kremlin’s realm. The intelligentsia were no longer Russian, but Russophone—united by their primary language while holding passports of new nations on increasing divergent paths.
That situation offered people a range of potential strategies from stubbornly sticking to their Russianness to reinventing their identity altogether. The latter avenue is available to many, if not most members of the intelligentsia, given their ethnic diversity. But most people went for a combination of both in ever-changing proportions, depending on circumstances and geopolitical choices.
The wonderful Odessa poet Boris Khersonsky, for example, has reinvented himself as both Ukrainian and Jewish nationalist who keeps emphasizing his own otherness from modern Russians—including friends and fellow ex-members of the Soviet dissident movement—while continuing to write both poetry and political commentary largely in the Russian language. A few Odessa and Kyiv-born people I knew of moved to Moscow in the 1990s, often becoming fully-fledged Putinists a decade later. Later, however, they would take up in lucrative jobs Ukraine as highly-qualified Moscow transplants and gradually morph into ardent Ukrainian nationalists in the wake of Russian aggression. These transitions tend to go seamlessly because Russian statism and different forms of anti-Russian ethnonationalism are two sides of the same far right coin.
Geopolitics vs Values
The Russian aggression against Ukraine provided the most powerful incentive for the intelligentsia to break up with the homeland. The occupation of Crimea generated a steady flow of politically motivated emigration (a wave that I joined, too), but it turned into an outpour at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. That massive exodus was partly driven by the fear of persecution—very real for the politically active minority and less so for its largely passive support base.
For the latter, the reasons ranged from moral principles to selfish pragmatism. The assumed pragmatism boiled down to essentialist perceptions of the Western side in the conflict being inherently “more civilized” and “on the right side of history”—views that stem from the 200-year-old self-perception as occidental missionaries in the land of savages. As former Russian politician Andrey Piontkovsky put it in 2022: “Ukraine is defending Western civilization from eastern barbarians.” That’s Western supremacism in its purest form.
This line of thinking leads more than a few members of the intelligentsia to a quintessentially Russian extreme – desiring Russia’s destruction. In a speech at a security conference in Tallinn, political scientist Sergey Medvedev, a prominent opinion leader with a large following, lamented that the West doesn’t have the guts to treat Russia like Nazi Germany—defeat militarily, occupy and dismember. “It is evident therefore that the world will have to keep living through the 21st century together with this toxic swamp in northern Eurasia, hoping that this yet-to-disintegrate empire will digest itself and generate some lifeforms that will be friendlier to the outer world.”
But the assumptions of the West’s “civilizational” supremacy look increasingly questionable given that the West is not exactly winning the conflict, partly because the moral aspect is rather more nuanced than the Western supremacists would have us believe. Rejecting Putin’s aggression on moral grounds is one thing, but presuming the West’s moral superiority is quite another. The West in the epoch of Trump—with the far right menace engulfing Europe and genocide in Gaza supported by the major powers—is hardly a Shining City upon a Hill, which is how it looked to many ex-Soviets, including myself, in 1991. Its wholesale embrace of radical Ukrainian ethnonationalism—down to Nazi collaborator chants repeated by senior Western politicians – is a larger-than-life symptom of that malaise.
Main opinion leaders of the Russian intelligentsia tend to parrot standard Western and Ukrainian ethnonationalist tropes with regards to the Russo-Ukrainian war, but these Manichean and essentialist explanations of the war’s historical roots leave more questions than answers, clashing massively with their perception of intellectual decency and lived experience (which involves permanent exposure to Ukraine and Ukrainians, often close relatives, over the entire course of life). Too many things in Ukraine are hard to explain or justify if you oppose Putin’s aggression on moral rather than geopolitical. That includes brutal press gangs hunting for new army recruits in the streets of Ukrainian cities as well as thousands of Ukrainians serving prison sentences for “collaboration” with Russia. Eleven prominent Russian political prisoners equalized themselves with these people, describing them as “civic hostages” in a recent appeal for an “all for all” swap of prisoners between Ukraine and Russia. “All of us have been punished for one thing – our civic position,” they wrote.
Rampant far right extremism that defines politics in Ukraine is also hard to ignore—as in the case of the new head of Ukrainian National Memory Institute, former Azov movement spokesman Oleksandr Alfiorov, who said in his very first interview after an appointment that Hitler was a highly educated person compared to Putin, while Holocaust-era Germans were far more cultured than contemporary Russians who, he claimed, were worse than orcs.
But the intelligentsia’s discourse on Ukraine is subdued, partly by the sense of collective guilt for Putin’s actions, partly because of fear of reprisals. One of those who dares criticize Ukraine is the controversial rightwing commentator Yulia Latynina, who was recently sanctioned by Zelensky’s administration. In a lengthy response on X, Latynina shamed the Russian opposition for turning a blind eye on what she calls the “elephant in the room”, including a mudflow of xenophobic rhetoric which top Ukrainian officials pour on Russians, no matter what they stand for.
She recalled Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak insulting them as “a nation of murderers and non-humans, the biological garbage of this world,” former Ukrainian Security Council Oleksiy Danilov chief calling them “inhuman Asians,” and Zelensky himself urging all Russians to be expelled from the EU, including those who fled Russia due to their opposition to war in Ukraine (tellingly, Zelensky and Yermak come from Russian-speaking Soviet intelligentsia families). The reaction to Latynina’s post in Russian opposition circles was by and large disdainful, with virtually no one offering support.
Unlike Ukraine, the controversy over the Gaza genocide and Israel’s war on Iran is out in the open. Thousands of Russians fled to Israel after February 2022, the start of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine. Just over a year later, in October 2023, they found themselves on the battlefield of another major conflict. That’s where the breaking point came, whereby some of the people capable of critical thinking in the context of Putin’s Russia became vulnerable to the crudest of infowar tricks and military propaganda.
Western supremacism shone through the commentary. “Israel today (just like Ukraine) is the frontline in the war of western civilization against political and ethical archaism—a well-armed and lethally dangerous archaism,” the famous satirist Viktor Shenderovich wrote at the outset of Israel’s attack on Iran in June. One of the sharpest critics of Putin’s regime, Shenderovich was arrested during the Jean-Jacques raid back in 2012. The above-mentioned Latynina goes on with much the same tropes when it comes to Israel.
There was something truly mesmerizing in this transition from healthy skepticism and outrage at the Kremlin’s rampant lies to embracing the alternate reality in which facts are being dismissed wholesale while everyone who describes Netanyahu’s methods in Gaza as genocidal—Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and much of the mainstream Western media— is seen as an anti-Semitic conspirator aimed at undoing the Jewish state. The sheer scale of pro-Israeli agitation in the Russophone sphere raises the question: What was whose conflict with Putin about? Is it universal values or geopolitical choices, which boil down to crude Western supremacism and imperialism?
By contrast with Ukraine, pro-Israeli opinion leaders meet a considerable backlash from rank-and-file members of the intelligentsia, including Israeli passport holders. Genocidal comments like those by the writer Dina Rubina—she said in a TV interview that she wants Palestinians “completely exterminated”, “dissolved in hydrochloric acid” and that Gaza should be “turned into a parking lot”2—in fact prompted masses of people to read more about the plight of Palestinians despite being pro-Israeli by default, as most Russian liberal intellectuals are.
A Russian-Israeli friend (who opposes genocide) told me that the cannibalistic zeal of pro-Israeli Russians is primarily driven by the sense of belonging. People hailing from post-totalitarian environments feel orphaned in the absence of a strongman backed by a security apparatus and state of the art weaponry. Netanyahu, the Mossad and the IDF fully fit the bill while retaining a strong affiliation with the “civilized” world, as opposed to the “uncivilized” Putin.
This is the path of least resistance as opposed to the perpetual “anxiety of independent thinking” in the words of Gorky’s character. The other path is way thornier, especially now that the West no longer works as a role model, not least because of the cowardly conformism of its intellectual elites. Thankfully, it is the Russian intelligentsia itself that developed a method for approaching this task during darker historical periods. If the outside world is unfree, you can still cultivate your internal freedom.
The old political prisoners’ maxim of “don’t expect, don’t fear, don’t plead” applies to one’s life as an exile in the contemporary West as much as it applied to life in the Gulag, because it works for any society with a deficiency of freedom. If the West has chosen to follow Russia into the darkness of nativism and militarism, we can still cherish our own freedom and avoid Sieg-Heiling with the rest of the crowd.
But to achieve that, one needs to follow Anton Chekhov’s advice and keep “squeezing out your inner slave drop by drop”—and that means squeezing out the inherent servility which comes with being a part of Russian—or indeed—European/Western intelligentsia. This is hardly confined to rejecting Putin: there is a far larger, all-encompassing evil of far-right populism and militarism in the contemporary world that needs to be firmly rejected.
But if I choose to go by the Russian intelligentsia’s recipe, if its habits and instincts can provide a dignified escape from a hostile and unsavory world, then why would I escape from the Russian intelligentsia? Perhaps a glass of wine at Cafe Vivien, aka Jean-Jacques, is a better idea.
Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist and travel writer based in Riga. He spent 12 years with the BBC, contributed to a host of leading English-language media and co-authored a book about the conflict in Ukraine, En Eiropeisk Tragedie, published in Norway.
- Afanasyev was referring to the conservative parliamentary majority, not the Russian people as a whole, but the phrase went on to live a life of its own. ↩︎
- The interview was aired by the fugitive Russian channel TVRain with these words cut out. But the interviewer, Mikhail Kozyrev, published the full quote on Meta. He later apologized to Rubina and his channel for doing so. ↩︎
