The Icon and the Axe

A collective shock treatment paralleling that being given to the reluctant peasantry was being administered to the intellectual elite. Figures like Averbach in literary theory and Pokrovsky in history were used in this first "proletarian" phase of Stalinist terror to discredit others before being rejected themselves. Stalin emerged from it all as the benign father, the voice of moderation and protector of the little man from the "dizziness from success" of his less humane lieutenants.16 This "proletarian episode" in Russian culture, which lasted roughly from the first party decree on literature in December, 1928, to the abolition of the distinctively proletarian organs of culture in April, 1932, was coterminous with the period of the first Five-Year Plan; part of the unprecedented effort to transform Russian society by forced-draft industrialization and agricultural collectivization. The cultural transformations of the age, no less than the social and economic changes, bear little relationship to anything that went before in Russian history-not even to the garrison atmosphere and fierce proletarian emphases of the Civil War period. Proletarian origins and Marxist convictions were losing all importance. Indeed, the Marxist intellectuals who had played a key part in refining Communist ideology and building the new Soviet state became increasingly prime victims in the new purges of the thirties, and fanatical proletarian advocates of Revolutionary egalitarianism were denounced as "levelers" and left deviationists. There was no serious threat to the Soviet state in the late twenties; and by 1930 the depression in the West had made the danger of "capitalist encirclement" even more remote and contrived. The purpose of this "second revolution" was-as Stalin made clear in a famous speech in 1931-to create a "new Soviet intelligentsia"17 dedicated to acquiring the technological skills needed for Soviet construction. The demand for a new intelligentsia required the destruction, or drastic remaking, of the old, including those whose emotional dedication to radical humanism might also stand in the way of building the new authoritarian state. Technological skill alone was not enough. Rigid obedience to party leaders was required. As Stalin put it bluntly in 1935: "Cadres decide everything,"18 and the ideal cadre is the tempered, "cast-iron" servant of the dictator. To understand how such a drastic conclusion was reached one must look back to the legacy left by Vladimir IFich Lenin, the founder and patron saint of Bolshevism, the man in whose name Stalin tightened his totalitarian grip on all of Russian society. One must consider as well the relationship which both Lenin and Stalin bear to the complex cultural heritage of the land they ruled.

The Leninist Legacy

At first glance, the powerful and arresting figure of Lenin seems to be only a particularly intense example of the alienated Russian intellectual of the nineteenth century. Born and educated in the Volga region, classic center of Russian revolutionary sentiment, brought up as a member of the petty, provincial nobility in a bookish home where he was closer to his mother than his father, Lenin was an educated and qualified lawyer, but never really had any other profession than that of an illegal publicist turned revolutionary. One is tempted to see in Lenin's sudden vault to power the vindication of the intelligentsia's long-frustrated hopes for a new order in which they would play a key part.

Yet Lenin was different from almost all his intellectual predecessors in nineteenth-century Russia; and it was his profound alienation from the dominant intellectual trends of the late imperial period which enabled him to appear as the bearer of a genuinely new order of things.

First of all, Lenin was uniquely single-minded in an age of diffusion. In the midst of the soaring visionaries, Lenin focused his attention, op QJ1" all-consuming objective that had not traditionally been uppermost in the thinking of the intelligentsia: the attainment of power. His dedication to this objective enabled him to establish a puritanical discipline over his own emotions and those of his associates. By never giving himself over to the enervating enthusiasms of the late imperial period, he avoided its unsettling alternations between Promethean optimism and morbid sensualism. He was able to capitalize on the sense of expectation generated by the intelligentsia without becoming involved in the ebb and flow of its inner feelings.