At the same time, a more profound shift was under way, marking a historic break with the intelligentsia’s social purpose and political orientation. Among much of the cultural and artistic elite, a long-standing identification with the people – always laced with ambiguities, to be sure – gave way to an embrace of the market forces riding roughshod over them. The bulk of the country’s intellectual elite were prominent supporters first of Gorbachev’s perestroika and then of Yeltsin. Many of the key personnel implementing the 1990s reforms – Yegor Gaidar, Chubais and others – were drawn from cultural and academic circles. In their eyes, the demolition of the Soviet system was essential to Russia’s advance toward ‘civilization’, and they vociferously backed ‘shock therapy’ and the free-market reforms against any and all opposition: it was Yeltsin or the abyss.
A crucial moment came in 1993, during the president’s standoff with the Supreme Soviet. The day after the shelling of the parliament building, an open letter appeared in Izvestiia, signed by forty-two writers, stating that ‘these dumb bastards respect only force’, and urging the government to take further ‘decisive measures’, including the banning of Communist and nationalist parties and the closure of their newspapers.{34} Barely a year later, many of the same intellectuals took a principled stand against the bombing of civilians in Grozny; but as the former dissident Andrei Sinyavsky put it, ‘The intelligentsia has not yet understood that the war in Chechnya is a direct continuation of the firing on the White House.’{35} Behind the intelligentsia’s political failing, according to Sinyavsky, lay a deeper desertion of their historic popular sympathies: ‘The intelligentsia, which in the past had lived with the people and shared its misfortunes to such an extent that the very term “intellectual”… unequivocally implied a love for the people, was today afraid of those same people.’{36}
In some cases, that fear was overpowered by contempt: in January 1999, shortly after the rouble crisis, novelist and critic Viktor Erofeev disparaged the mass of the Russian population as ‘medieval creatures’ who were ‘dragging Russia down toward the bottom’:
However one relates to it, this mass has, by the will of chance, been turned into an electorate; it has a vote, but has nothing in common with democracy. What is to be done with it? Deceive it? Wash it? Re-educate it? Wait for it to die? The last option is illusory: old people trail grandchildren, great-grandchildren behind them who will also stand on all fours… Only one thing remains: to put them in a concentration camp. But they are in any case already there.{37}
Such language was unusual only in its vicious directness; couched in other forms and arguments, the sentiments behind it were widespread.
How completely was the Russian intelligentsia ‘unmade’ in the 1990s – was it in fact slated for total disappearance? In 1994, Gudkov and Dubin concluded mournfully that the intelligentsia as currently constituted was unable to address the country’s situation: ‘Other groups and people, it seems, will resolve the problems that have accumulated – people who have been educated differently, with a different understanding of themselves and the world in which they live.’{38} The philosopher Mikhail Ryklin thought his entire generation had already entered the afterlife, subsisting in a zombie-like state: ‘After the death of the country in which we were born, we have already become dead people, and so the death that awaits us will not be the first.’{39}
Yet neither these otherworldly metaphors nor the dislocation that had inspired them were unprecedented – as the title of Masha Gessen’s 1997 book on the Russian intelligentsia, Dead Again, wryly attests. Epochal crises had several times threatened the intelligentsia with destruction – the Revolution, Civil War, Stalinist purges and the Second World War – before Brezhnevism all but bored it to death. Each time there had then been a rebirth or refoundation, in a novel form and changed atmosphere. Would it not emerge yet again, blinking, into the new century?
Despite all the novelties the free-market transition of the 1990s brought, the switchover from the old social structure to the new could never be instantaneous or total. The two continued to exist in parallel, with new social actors coming into being alongside the remnants of the state-socialist system. Often the latter provided a meagre guarantee of income or perhaps some basic, non-monetized services; but the little it offered was never enough, and had to be supplemented with gains from market-oriented work – potentially more sustaining, but always more risky. This meant that millions of Russians found themselves inhabiting multiple social roles. The metamorphic blurring this created was captured in Viktor Pelevin’s 1993 novel The Life of Insects, in which people are suddenly and arbitrarily transformed – a teenager turns into a moth, a widow becomes an ant, a prostitute becomes a mosquito – and all sense of scale or causality dissolves, along with any meaningful boundary between species.
The sheer confusion the process of ‘transition’ generated was one obvious reason for the relative lack of protests in Russia in the 1990s. Most people were struggling to survive, and many opted for individualized solutions amid the collapse of older collectivities. Privatization also made it hard in many cases to identify who exactly should be the target of protest: in much of Russian industry, for example, the actual ownership structure was hidden behind layers of shell companies and investment vehicles. As a result, the vast majority of strikes took place in the state sector rather than the private one (education alone accounted for almost 90 per cent of them between 1992 and 1996).{40}
But there were two further factors behind the strange quiescence of the Russian population, both of them examples of the persistence of the old lending support to the new. Firstly, the way Soviet industry had been organized made a huge difference. The fundamental unit was the enterprise, and despite the many differences between them, workers and management within an enterprise had tended to present a common front – for instance, against state administrators imposing plan targets. When the planned economy began to fall apart, these basic units remained largely intact, while the fabric that held them together was torn into pieces of varying sizes and shapes. After 1991, the depth of the crisis often gave rise to a defensive solidarity between workers and management, as they strove to keep production going. In many cases this was the only way for workers to keep not only their jobs but also the housing and other basic social guarantees that were, for now, still provided at the enterprise level. Paradoxically, the end of Communism reinforced workers’ dependence on the old paternalistic model.
Secondly, trade unions played an often overlooked but important role. In Soviet times, trade unions had been ‘transmission belts’ for the party–state, their main function being to stimulate production; they were also tasked with administering some social benefits within enterprises. In theory, the end of Communism could have made room for organizations that were more independent of management. But on the whole, the old enterprise-level unions remained in place, as component parts of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR). Many of the personnel and reflexes of Soviet unionism were carried over – and if anything, in the crisis conditions of the 1990s the unions’ dependence on management only deepened. At the national level, union leaders were soon enough made politically docile, particularly by Yeltsin’s 1993 move to strip FNPR affiliates of the right to administer many social benefits.{41}