Russia's Democratic Intellectuals Betrayed Their People

There is an apocryphal story concerning the first stage of the 1917 Russian Revolution, taking place in July, during the sailor's demonstration in the then-capital Petrograd. Disgusted at the government's unwillingness to consider the demands coming from the streets, barracks, factories, and villages, the common folk looked to the Soviet to provide democratic leadership. Yet the Soviet was at this time composed of waffling intelligentsia, too consumed by class snobbery and their own personal status to grasp the opportunities and responsibilities of the moment. Victor Chernov, leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, of the Soviet, and Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government, epitomized the entire Russian intelligentsia of the period.

According to legend, Chernov was cornered by a pack of angry sailors from the Kronstadt Naval Yard during the "July Days" demonstrations of 1917. One of them shook his fist in Chernov's face, crying, "Take the power you son of a bitch, when it's handed to you!" Chernov instead nearly fainted, and was rescued from a possibly worse fate by the intervention of none other than Leon Trotsky, who came to the rescue in his personal automobile and whisked Chernov from the mob.

In this story is summed the indecisiveness, waffling, snobbery and confusion - not to mention toadying to the West - which allowed the reigns of power to slip from the hands of the Russian democratic intelligentsia, at a crucial time when their guidance was desperately needed by common people sick of the old way and ready for a new one. Thus the "dark people" - peasants, workers, common soldiers - turned to leaders like Lenin and Trotsky who did not mince words and would indeed take the power when offered.

This betrayal of ideals was renacted in 1991 following the "August Days" in Moscow, when a new generation of democratic intellectuals rose to power in the collapse of the old order. Rather than lead the common folk into a new era, they once again withdrew into class snobbery, opportunism, and toadying to the West, brushing aside the interests of the ordinary citizen as they gleefully wrecked the economy and plunged many into misery and hopelessness. That this occurred in peacetime guaranteed, fortnately, that the country would not implode into civil war this go-around; but in the fifteen-year-muddle since, one sees what Russia would have become had their predecessors clung to power in '17: a second-rate, neo-colonial pseudo-empire fraying at the seams, unsure of its purpose or direction, waffling and indecisive in everything save in its leaders' opportunism and profiteering.