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Dead Again The Russian Intelligentsia After CommunismStock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionIsaiah Berlin once argued that the concept of the intelligentsia was "Russia's greatest contribution to world civilization." Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian intelligentsia has shared a profound sense of responsibility for the fate of its country and a belief in the transformative power of the Word—a belief reinforced by the state, which has relentlessly tried to suppress any form of intellectual dissent. Starting in 1986, this belief has been sorely tested. The floodgates of information were opened, but no miracle followed. No new sense of morality was awakened, no one rushed to redeem the nation. Indeed, once the novelty of free speech wore off, people lost interest in it. While the intelligentsia was watching its most treasured dream disintegrate, it was also losing its social standing, its prestige and, finally, its money. As it had frequently done in the past, the intelligentsia responded by declaring itself dead, obsolete. Once again, it was the end. Author descriptionMasha Gessen was born in Russia in 1967, and forced to leave in 1981 by state-enforced anti-Semitism. After working as a writer and editor on magazines including The Advocate and Outweek in the United States, she returned to Moscow in 1994. She is now staff writer on the magazine Itogi and political columnist for the journal Matador. She is a contributing editor to the American magazine Lingua Franca and writes regularly on Russia for the New Republic and the New Statesman. She edited and translated an anthology of contemporary Russian women's fiction and was a contributing editor to Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement. |