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The Russian Intelligentsia of the 1890's

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Allan K. Wildman
Allan K. Wildman*
Affiliation:
Project on History of Menshevism Department of History, University of Chicago
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Extract

The nurturing bed of russian intelligentsia ideas and values in the 1890's was the kruzhok. The one infallible earmark of intelligenty since the time of the Masonic Lodges of the eighteenth century was their instinctive propensity, in whatever situation they found themselves, to coagulate into small kruzhki. In these kruzhki literature was assembled, exchanged, and discussed, referaty containing theses were presented and heatedly debated, and sooner or later kruzhki became the spring-board for more organized activity of an illegal or conspiratorial nature. If an individual did not manifest this penchant for kruzhkovshchina, it was a sign that somehow he did not belong to the intelligentsia.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 1960 , pp. 157 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1960

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References

1 Martov, Ju., Zapiski Socialdemokrata (Berlin, 1922)Google Scholar.

2 Maklakov, V. A., Iz Vospominanii (New York, 1954), p. 42 Google Scholar.

3 Victor, Chernov, Zapiski socialista revoljucionera (Berlin, 1922). pp. 114–15 Google Scholar.

4 Chernov, p. 121 Google Scholar.

5 Ibid.

6 Novoe Slovo was founded by the more orthodox Populists under the leadership of Krivenko from former contributors to Russkoe Bogatsvo who felt themselves overshadowed by the not-so-orthodox Mikhailovskij.

7 Krivenko, , “K voprosu c nuzdakh narodnykh promyshlennosti,” Russkoe Bogatsvo, No. 10 (1894), p. 127 Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 129.

9 Ibid.

10 Russkoe Bogatstvo, No. 3 (1894), p. 53 Google Scholar.

11 Chernov, pp. 274–75 Google Scholar.

12 Struve claims that he became a “Social Democrat” around 1888, i.e., when he was still in the gymnasium. In 1890 he made a trip abroad where he procured a large collection of German Social Democratic literature and managed to smuggle it back into Russia. As the most influential book on his thinking he mentions a German scholarly work, Der Emanzipationskampf des vierten Standes by Rudolf Meyer. He was also familiar with the works of Plekhanov. Hence, he was one of the few to become a convinced “Social Democrat” before the famine of 1891. However, these convictions may have still been quite vague. When he read Das Kapitalis not clear.

13 Martov, p. 138.

14 Ibid., p. 140.

15 The tactics envisaged by Natanson corresponded very closely to those which actually did bring the autocracy to its knees in 1905.

16 See his Etjudy o russkoj intelligentsii (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 174ff.Google Scholar