Leon Trotsky
CONCERNING THE INTELLIGENTSIA
It
is part of the irony of history tha t in a period of nearly
universal self-betrayal and retreat from advanced positions the caste–
pride of the intelligentsi a is reaching its highest intensity. Never has
the intelligentsia fill ed so much space, disposing of itself in the most
varied camps, among the bourgeois liberals as among the Marxists. Never
TRANS LATORS '
Non:. - This essa y, written in 19 12, wh ile Trotsky was
living as an emigre in Vienna, was first published in the Kiev journal
Kie vskaya
Mysl
(Kievan Thought ) . Trotsky had escaped to western Europe from Siberia,
where he h ad been exiled after the 1905-06 R evolution because of his leading
role in the first Petersburg Soviet of Workers' D eputies. With the
coup
of June
3, 190 7, the autocracy regained most of its powers; the second Duma was dis–
persed and its Social D emocra tic deputi es were deported to Siberia. The reestab–
lished Czardom crushed the revolutionary pa rties, executing or ja iling thousands
of activists. In the circles of the intellige ntsia, most of which were openly
sympathetic to socialism during the heyday of the revolution:HY uprising, a mood
of disillusionment, d epression and outright confusion p revai led. While Trotsky
a nd other leading M arxists saw in the triumph of reaction nothing more than
a mere interlude between two revolutions, a great ma ny members of the intel–
ligentsia shifted their a llegiance to other programs and ideologies, such as
religious mysticism, "decadentism" in literature and an exalted introspectiveness
of a peculiarly self-inflationary kind. E·ven some members of Lenin's group
(e.g., Gorky, Lunacharsky and Bogda nov ) went so far as to associate themselves
with the tendency known as " God-building." It is against this backgrou nd that
the note of exasp eration wi th the in te lligentsia sounded by Trotsky in this
essay can best be understood . Also, there is the fac t tha t prolonged sojourn in
western Europe provided Trotsky with a new p ersp ective on the Russian move–
ment. H e was more Europ ea n in orientation than almost a ll of the rmigres, who
lived in closed circles compl etely preoccupied with Russian affairs . T rotsky, on
the other hand, who was well versed in French and German, wrote in these
languages for leading socialist periodica ls and was made to feel a t home by
the intellectual elite of the German and
J\
ustrian Social D emocratic parties.
Then as in la ter years he stood for the "Eu ropeanization" of Russian socialism.
