In a recent account of Soviet life in the 1970s, an American journalist drew attention to the lack of individual self-assertiveness he observed among Soviet citizens: “We sometimes speak of a person's ‘sense of self.’ This concept does not exist in the Russian language.” Historically, however, if not strictly speaking, linguistically, Russian life did contain just such a concept: the intelligentsia. The history of this unique Russian social phenomenon extended from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s (the word itself seems to have entered Russian usage only in the 1860s, however), and the present-day Soviet dissidents are in many ways the intelligentsia's spiritual heirs. What links the historical intelligentsia and its latter-day successors, and serves as their defining characteristic, is precisely a concept of individual sovereignty. Their effort to assert a “sense of self” against a political and social environment hostile to it has been, and remains, the source of their dissent from the status quo.