4 Proletkult Leadership: The New and the Old lntelligentsia
The Russian Revolution, like all revolutions, challenged the authority of the old elites and the long-standing patterns of social hierarchy. Once in power, however, the Bolsheviks quickly discovered that if they wanted to build a stable system, they had to construct a new elite to take the place of the old one. To find the necessary human resources, the party reached out to the lower classes, a solution that best fitted the spirit of the revolution. However, this solution was not enough to sustain the state. The new leaders promoted from the proletariat and peasantry often had little training or experience for their jobs. In order for the regime to survive it employed both force and persuasion to induce intellectuals and experts trained under tsarism to serve the Soviet government.
The creation of a stable, accomplished, and loyal elite was a major preoccupation of the regime during the early Soviet years. The state's solution, to mold a hybrid leadership from representatives of both the lower and the old privileged classes, was one born of necessity. Nonetheless, it raised objections from workers' groups, which resented the status this course conferred on their old class enemies. It also dismayed
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revolutionary idealists, who envisioned an egalitarian society without an elite at all.
To their credit, Bogdanov and his allies in the Vpered circle had anticipated many of these difficulties long before the October uprising. They argued that in order for the coming revolution to be successful, the working class would have to generate its own elite before it attempted to take power. But the solution they had proposed, the slow and painstaking education of a working-class intelligentsia before the revolution came, was of little relevance after 1917. Proletkultists, like government leaders and party officials, had to devise new schemes to solve the problem of revolutionary leadership.
Because the movement placed such emphasis on proletarian creativity and independence, its proponents often asserted that the working class could undertake the management of revolutionary society on its own. Proletkultists were famous for their glorification of proletarian abilities, something particularly evident in the organization's artistic productions. "We are everything, we are everywhere, we are the conquering fire and light," proclaimed the poet Vladimir Kirillov. "We are our own God, Judge, and Law."[1] Such sentiments inspired denunciations of the old intelligentsia and its place in revolutionary society. No wonder, then, that many scholars see the Proletkult as one of the most extreme advocates of workers' control.[2]
Yet despite its radical reputation, the Proletkult could not avoid the problems faced by other revolutionary institutions in the early Soviet years. The Russian proletariat was too small, too overburdened, and too inexperienced to take power on its own. New state commissariats tried to induce tsarist bureaucrats to remain in their old positions. The Red Army
[1] Vladimir Kirillov, "My," in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy , by Vladimir Kirillov (Moscow, 1970), p. 36.
[2] See, for example, Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia (Princeton, 1978), p. 59; and S. A. Fediukin, The Great October Revolution and the Intelligentsia , trans. Sinclair Lourit (Moscow, 1975), p. 47.
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could not fight the Civil War without the aid of tsarist generals. In Soviet factories a combination of economic hardship and severe political pressure forced workers to accept the aid of managers and engineers. And even the most iconoclastic Proletkuh participants discovered it was not possible to engage in cultural creation without the services of the old cultural elite—the writers, painters, and educators who had gained their experience under the old regime.