The October Revolution and Intellectuals

Less than a hundred years ago, a year after the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Maxim Gorky, the famous Russian writer, expressed his skepticism and distrust towards the new Communist leaders of Russia in an article that was later published in the book "Untimely Thoughts": "I am especially suspicious and distrustful of any Russian who comes to power. This is a person who has recently been a slave and as soon as he gains dominance over his neighbor, he becomes an autocratic tyrant." It should be noted that Gorky, who was close to Lenin at the beginning of the Moscow Revolution and was even introduced by Radio Moscow as "the greatest Russian writer, a friend of workers and a fighter for the victory of communism" at the time of his death on June 8, 1936, was one of the first committed intellectuals who faced Lenin's wrath and criticism after the Bolsheviks' victory and was exiled for several years to Sorrento, Italy. Gorky's forced exile indicated that Lenin and many leaders of the Bolshevik Party in Russia could not tolerate questions and criticisms from Russian intellectuals, and as later demonstrated by the era of terror under Stalin, there was no place for critical intellectualism in the so-called "Soviet" and "socialist" system. Interestingly, just months before the closure of his magazine titled "New Life," Gorky criticized the Bolsheviks in an article dated November 20, 1917, stating: "Lenin, Trotsky, and their companions, even before they have achieved anything, have been poisoned by the filthy venom of power, and this can be seen in their shameful attitude towards the issue of freedom of expression." Lenin's fear of the intellectual group stemmed from his uncertainty about their joining the ranks of the revolution, although many Russian and non-Russian artists and intellectuals joined communist parties worldwide or supported the ideals of communism from afar. Gorky's precise and critical observations bear many similarities to Bertrand Russell's theories after his visit to Moscow in August 1920. Russell wrote in a letter to Otto Lain Morrell: "My time in Russia was one of the most interesting periods of my life, but it was accompanied by much suffering. Bolshevism is a closed, authoritarian bureaucracy with a more sophisticated and terrifying espionage system than the Tsarist regime." That same year, in his book "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism," Russell described Bolshevism as: "Bolshevism is not just a political doctrine; it is also a religion with expertly shaped dogmas and inspired sacredness." There is no doubt that in such a mental framework and ideological apparatus, there is no room for critical intellectualism, and this is something that Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were well aware of. From Lenin's perspective and that of many leaders of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, it was these Marxist revolutionaries, not the "reformist and bourgeois intellectuals," who were to convey the revolutionary principles of Marx and Engels to the workers and peasants of the world, outside the dusty shelves of European libraries. This was the role that Lenin, Trotsky, and some other Russian revolutionaries had in mind. Therefore, from reading Lenin's works, one can conclude that he was generally opposed to the political and moral leadership of intellectuals. In this regard, in many of Lenin's writings before and after the 1917 revolution, we encounter serious and harsh criticism of intellectuals. For example, when Lenin was involved in forming the Bolshevik Party in 1903, he accused his opponents of having a "unstable intellectual mindset" and of being "bourgeois intellectuals who are indifferent to proletarian organization." He also wrote in a message dated October 19, 1917, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "The only way to keep the workers' party healthy is to purge a dozen intellectuals from within the organization." And indeed, this method of purging intellectuals was precisely the process that began during Lenin's presidency and reached its peak with their assassination. Perhaps for this reason, the gap between Lenin's dictatorial project and Stalin's totalitarianism was merely a small political step taken by the leaders and executors of the Soviet Communist Party, continuing with the trial and execution of many of them, such as Bukharin, Zinoviev, Radek, and Kamenev. Interestingly, after Lenin's death and his readiness to seize power, Stalin referred to Trotsky and his supporters as "petty-bourgeois intellectuals." Lenin and the early leaders of the Soviet Communist Party were familiar with this sentiment, but their suspicion and distrust of intellectuals and artistic geniuses in Russia were such that in 1918, the revolutionary government of Moscow dissolved the Russian Teachers' Union and placed it entirely under the control of the Party. Shortly after, Zinoviev, who later became a victim of Stalin's terror, declared that for the Party leaders, the term "student" was equivalent to "White Guard." Stalin's Russia, despite having supporters among Western artists and intellectuals such as Althusser, Aragon, Eluard, and Elsa Triolet, continued its anti-creative and anti-intellectual policies by isolating poets like Akhmatova and Pasternak and sending poets like Osip Mandelstam to forced labor camps. This linguistic approach to intellectualism and intellectuals, which George Orwell later addressed in his novel "1984," became the dominant discourse of communist parties worldwide for many years. For example, Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, referred to intellectuals in a speech related to the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as individuals who "are not like workers and are easily influenced by the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois environment from which they originate." However, Stalin's Russia, despite having supporters among Western artists and intellectuals, continued its anti-creative and anti-intellectual policies by isolating poets like Akhmatova and Pasternak and sending poets like Osip Mandelstam to forced labor camps. Statistics obtained from Soviet intelligence archives indicate that in the 1920s and 1930s, over two thousand writers, poets, artists, and intellectuals were sent to Stalin's forced labor camps, of which one thousand five hundred lost their lives. This sense of danger towards intellectuals, which was present among the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party at the beginning of the revolution, later became an unlimited plague in the dictatorship of Stalin, leaving the question in minds: Why did Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, and others, who were themselves considered intellectuals and deemed collaboration with intellectuals and artists like Mayakovsky and Gorky necessary for the victory of the revolution, adopt political violence against them from the very beginning of the Bolshevik Party's rule in Soviet Russia? Perhaps the best answer to this question can be found in a section of Leszek Kołakowski's book "Main Currents of Marxism." Kołakowski writes: "The most powerful force that existed in the new society was police repression... Lenin pointed out that in the new society, the law, in the traditional sense of the word, should have no connection to the concept of law, meaning that it should never be allowed to restrict the power of the government... Thus, the officials had no concern about legal frameworks but were able to arrest, imprison, or kill anyone who was considered a potential threat to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'" Although the 1917 Russian Revolution can be considered the spiritual child of Russian intellectuals, what the seventy-year history of the revolution in Russia shows us is one of the most terrifying "patricides" in human civilization.