📕It is common to blame all of Russia's ailments on the Russian intelligentsia📕
Alexander Dugin
It is common to blame all of Russia's ills on the Russian intelligentsia. This term is purely Russian, and in other languages, it is written as "intelligentsia," referring to the Russian context. The Latin "intelligentsia" means reason, rational being, intellect. That is by no means what we mean.
I wouldn't be quick to generalize about the intelligentsia. The disastrous influence of the West wasn't brought to Russia by the intelligentsia – it didn't even exist in the 18th century. It was the state – Tsar Peter – that did it.
Pushkin said that in Russia the only European (i.e., a scoundrel) was the state. He meant that the people were different, that they were the bearers of their own, unique Russian civilization.
The Russian intelligentsia emerged in the 19th century and was incredibly diverse. They gathered in circles, passionate about ideas, searching for truth, writing novels and poems, paintings and symphonies, debating their meanings, arguing until they were hoarse, and living for thought. These are the Russian youths of Dostoevsky, gripped by a profound longing. They could be arrogant and misguided, proud and irresponsible, shouting slogans, but they also traveled to the elder states in Optina, repented and suffered, promised to change, and yet still lapsed into extremes. They suffered sincerely for the people and loved them wholeheartedly, but sometimes didn't even understand what they truly loved or for whom they were fighting. They tried to say that Russia is more than a state, that it is a country (civilization), a society, a person, a community, a people. They were by no means purely Western in their thinking. They were at least half (if not more) distinctly Russian, their own. Even the Russian liberal Westernizers (though not all, but many) were primarily Russian nationalists who wanted to adopt Western technologies to become stronger and meet the West on equal terms. And in the West, too, the Russian intelligentsia sought something close to them, something Russian. And the Russian left-wing Narodniks, including the Socialist Revolutionaries and even the assassins, did not resort to violence out of love for liberalism, but for the people, for their truth, for what was Russian. They did not see the state as such. They saw it as the West. They wanted Russia. I won't even mention the Slavophile and Orthodox intelligentsia. They cared deeply for the state, but it simply betrayed them.
The Russian intelligentsia of the Silver Age strove for renewal. In the late Russian imperial period, they saw nothing but idiotic bureaucracy. Even the radical monarchist Lev Tikhomirov was not surprised by the fall of the monarchy. It was doomed to failure—not because of a lack of liberalism, but because of its excess.
In the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet intelligentsia desired continuity with the Silver Age. They wanted Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Orthodoxy and Sophiology, Cosmism and Idealism, Stravinsky and Scriabin, but not the market and not globalization, not gender theories and not LGBT rights, which were banned in the Russian Federation. The state, represented by the highest-ranking officials of the Communist Party—Yakovlev and Kosygin, Andropov and Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Sobchak—pushed westward. Time and again, it is the state that becomes the dominant Westernizer, the liberal, and the European in Russia. Not the intelligentsia. Yet everything is blamed on the intelligentsia.
Not that she's entirely innocent. Her infighting, vanity, egoism, hysteria, envy, and toxic skepticism don't improve the picture. She can't save Russia; she won't succeed. But the Russian intelligentsia isn't the main culprit for our suffering. That's what I really want to say. The most flamboyant villains in our history weren't Russian intellectuals, but something else. In the 1990s, it wasn't intellectuals who came to power in Russia, but a bunch of scum. An alienated, Russophobic state elite handed power over to another—a downright colonial, liberal one that wasn't even Western-oriented anymore, but simply Western. Ogonyok, Echo of Moscow, and Moskovsky Komsomolets were founded and supported by the state. From the top down. The intelligentsia's fault lies in the fact that they didn't recognize this immediately, didn't rebel, didn't rise up in protest. No, it began cooperating with the comprador bourgeoisie, just as it had once done with the Bolshevik dictatorship. That is, of course, shameful. But it didn't make the decisions. Everything was decided at another level. The state betrayed itself. The people and the intelligentsia became objects and victims of this operation. They were deceived.