Lenin On the Intelligentsia

A compilation of some ninety passages in which Lenin writes about the intelligentsia - its social position, its political vacillations, its indispensability to a backward country, and the terms on which a revolutionary state should employ people whose loyalty it doubted.

The subject was a live one for the state that assembled the book. The constitutional warrant is quoted in the foreword: Article 19 of the 1977 Constitution, making the alliance of workers, peasants and intelligentsia the social basis of the USSR. This is the official Soviet answer to a question the Soviet Union never stopped asking itself.

Its method is stated without evasion. Of the ninety-odd items, eighty-nine begin with the word From: there is not a single complete article, pamphlet or address between the covers. The foreword says so plainly, describing the contents as excerpts arranged chronologically with notes and a name index, and the Publishers' Note records that the translations come from the Collected Works.

That makes it an unusually testable object. Nothing has been rewritten - where the excerpts can be checked against the Collected Works they check out - so the question is what the scissors did: where each passage begins, where it stops, and what the compilers' own apparatus says about the men in it.

A genuine early-1980s book rather than a reprint, though its doctrinal furniture is late-Brezhnev: the most recent source cited anywhere is of 1970, and the latest Party congress named is the Fourteenth, of 1925.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.