His main charge was that the intelligentsia had failed in its most vital task: to speak on behalf of the people suppressed by an authoritarian state. Members of the intelligentsia had become part of the system, allowing themselves to get comfortable in its folds, nooks and crannies. “A hundred years ago,” he wrote in 1974, “the Russian intelligentsia considered a death sentence to be a sacrifice. Today an administrative reprimand is considered a sacrifice.” The Soviet intelligentsia had little in common with the nineteenth-century thinkers who had been wiped out by the revolution and Stalinist
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