And my mother’s, too; she had a PhD in chemistry, I have her books and her collection of rare minerals. A burglar broke into her house once . . . She woke up in the middle of the night to see a young thug standing in the middle of her apartment (it was a one-room apartment). He opened the closet and started throwing everything out of it. Hurling things on the floor, cursing: “Damn intelligentsia . . . You don’t even have a decent fur coat . . .” He ended up slamming the door and leaving. She had nothing for him to steal. That’s our intelligentsia for you.
