The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In a letter to Gorky on September 15, 1919—which we have already cited—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin replied to Gorky’s attempts to intercede in the arrests of members of the intelligentsia, among them, evidently, some of the defendants in this trial, and, commenting on the bulk of the Russian intelligentsia of those years (the “close-to-the-Cadets intelligentsia”), he wrote: “In actual fact they are not [the nation’s ] brains, but shit.”56 On another occasion he said to Gorky: “If we ]break too many pots, it will be its [the intelligentsia’s] fault.”57 If the intelligentsia wants justice, why doesn’t it come over to us? “I’ve gotten one bullet from the intelligentsia myself.”58 (In other words, from Kaplan.) On the basis of these feelings, he expressed his mistrust and hostility toward the intelligentsia: rotten-liberal; “pious”; “the slovenliness so customary among ‘educated’ people”;59 he believed the intelligentsia was always shortsighted, that it had betrayed the cause of the workers. (But when had the intelligentsia ever sworn loyalty to the cause of the workers, the dictatorship of the workers?) This mockery of the intelligentsia, this contempt for the intelligentsia, was subsequently adopted with enthusiasm by the publicists and the newspapers of the twenties and was absorbed into the current of day-to-day life. And in the end, the members of the intelligentsia accepted it too, cursing their eternal thoughtlessness, their eternal duality, their eternal spinelessness, and t...