authors and books, and all press except the Bolsheviks’, were forbidden in the Soviet Union. All publications appeared only after approval under strict Soviet censorship. In literature, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), with its dogmatic party approach controlled all works of Soviet writers. The communications of Soviet citizens with foreigners was severely restricted. Thus was created the Soviet intelligentsia, completely devoted to the communist regime.
Soviet propaganda even influenced the minds of some Russian emigrants. Among the Russian emigrant intelligentsia there appeared a movement called “left-wing Smenovekhism.” Members of this movement criticized the authors of Vekhi for “. . . their inability to accept the great Russian Revolution.” The authors of the volume of essays Smena Vekh (Change Landmarks) proclaimed their pro-Soviet position.
During Josef Stalin’s regime many thousands of intelligentsia became the innocent victims of political repression. Only a small percentage of them dared to resist the regime. Most of the repressed intelligentsia were loyal to the Soviet system. Among them were talented writers (Boris Pil’niak, Isaac Babel), poets (Osip Mandelshtam), scientists, and scholars. Others, such as the poet Marina Tsve-taeva, were pushed to commit suicide.
Nevertheless, the Communist government needed the creators of weapons and ideologies, as well as musicians and artists. Thus in the Soviet Union there always existed an intellectual elite that made distinguished achievements in many areas of scientific and scholarly life, and in art and culture. The other part of the Soviet intelligentsia actively collaborated with the state in the hope of promoting their careers, with the expectation of receiving some state privileges. Thus at the same time, when some Soviet writers, poets, artists, and musicians created masterpieces, others created works devoted to the Soviet political leaders. Huge portraits of Stalin and Lenin decorated every state office and their statues were erected in each city.
Some change in the political climate appeared after the secret speech of Nikita Khrushchev to the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956) about the crimes of Stalin’s regime. The time from this speech through the first part of the 1960s was called the period of cultural “Thaw.” At that time political executions were stopped, and the intelligentsia felt freer to express their ideas and feelings. During this period many political prisoners were released, including many intellectuals. The Thaw brought a new approach to culture and art, which became more humane. During these years many masterpieces of Russian literature were published, many of them devoted to the recent past: Stalin’s repression and World War II. Among these works was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, and Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. However, the treatment of Pasternak in the Soviet Union was appalling and hastened his death. Thus Khrushchev’s cultural policy was contradictory: he united some cultural liberalization with the continuation of some repression. During the cultural Thaw the Communist Party did not release culture from ideological control, but only extended the limits on the creativity of the intelligentsia.
The period of Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership (1964-1982) was a time of political and cultural stagnation. Stalin and his policies were somewhat rehabilitated, which led to increased repression against the intelligentsia. In 1965 two writers, An-drey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were arrested for publishing satirical works in the West. But the Soviet intelligentsia were not completely silent as in the past. Prominent intellectuals protested against the arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel. The period of Thaw, with the humanization of the society and the rethinking of the recent historical past, changed the social atmosphere in the Soviet Union. Soviet intellectuals began the dissident and “human rights” movements. They avoided state censorship by samizdat (self-publishing) printings that gave freedom of self-expression to their authors. The Soviet regime did not surrender its ideological positions and continued the persecution of nonconformist intellectuals. In 1974 the famous writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was forcibly deported from the Soviet Union. In 1980 the hydrogen bomb physicist and progressive thinker Andrei Sakharov was sent to internal exile to Gorky. These people who participated in the dissident and Human rights movements were the forerunners of glasnost and the transformation of the communist regime into a democratic society.
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Mikhail Gorbachev began his leadership in 1985 with an initiative for “democratization of social and economic life.” He did not want to undermine the communist regime, but intended to improve it and make it more effective. However, the liberalization of society and diminishing of the censorship opened the press and mass media for political discussions and public exposure of historical reality. In a short time this changed public opinion, social values, and the attitude of the majority of the society against the communist regime. After a long break the intelligentsia had revived their influence on public opinion. The former dissidents Andrey Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and hundreds of others returned from emigration, exile, and prisons to lead movements opposing the communists. All these processes, combined with the economic crisis, undermined the communist government. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 with the intelligentsia playing an important role in the destruction of the Soviet empire.
The post-Soviet years, however, have not become years of the flourishing of arts and sciences in the former Soviet states. In most of the new countries the intelligentsia have received freedom of expression, but have lost almost all government financial support. The new post-Soviet states are unable to adequately finance scientific projects and development of culture and art. Many intellectuals have lost their jobs, and some emigrated from the former Soviet states to the West in the 1990s. The future of the intelligentsia in the post-Soviet countries depends entirely upon political and economic developments. See also: AKSAKOV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH; AKSAKOV, KON- STANTIN SERGEYEVICH; BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEXAN-DROVICH; BELINSKY, VISSARION GRIGORIEVICH; BULGAKOV, SERGEI NIKOLAYEVICH; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH; JOURNALISM; PISAREV, DMITRY IVANOVICH; SOLZHENITSYN, ALEXANDER ISAYEVICH.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acton, Edward. (1997). “Revolutionaries and Dissidents: The Role of the Russian Intellectual in the Downfall of Tsarism and Communism.” In Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie, edited by Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch. London and New York: Routledge. Fisher, George. (1969). Russian Liberalism from Gentry to Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (2001). Russia and the Russians. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Kagarlitsky, Boris. (1994). The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State, 1917 to the Present, tr. Brian Pierce. London, New York: Verso. Pipes, Richard, ed.(1961). The Russian Intelligentsia. New York: Columbia University Press. Pomper, Philip. (1970). The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia.New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Inc. Read, Christopher. (1990). Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism. Houndmills, Bas-ingstoke, Hampshire and London: The Macmillan Press LTD. Slapentokh, Vladimir. Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tompkins, Stuart Ramsay. (1957). The Russian Intelligentsia: Makers of the Revolutionary State. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
VICTORIA KHITERER
In 1987 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the first major Soviet- U.S. disarmament agreement-the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The pact broke precedent in three ways. Previous treaties limited weapons, but the INF Treaty stipulated abolition of top-of-the-line missiles. Second, the deal was highly asymmetrical: Moscow gave up more than Washington. Third, the treaty’s provisions were to be verified not just by “national means” (mainly, spy satellites), but also by on-site inspections by Soviets in the United States and Americans in the USSR.
Demand for such a treaty arose in the 1970s when the USSR began to deploy what the West called SS-20 missiles. These were two-stage, intermediate-range missiles, many of them mobile, hard for the United States to track or attack. Since most SS-20s targeted Europe (some aimed at China), they were intimidating to America’s NATO partners.
The Reagan administration proposed a “zero option.” If the USSR abolished all its SS-20s, the United States
