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Troublemaker
In his turbulent career, dissident author Andrei Sinyavsky made plenty of enemies in the Soviet establishment -- and among his fellow liberal intellectuals as well.
By Catharine Nepomnyashchy
Published: October 7, 2005
Andrei Sinyavsky, who would have turned 80 this weekend, was never afraid to ruffle feathers. Outside of the literary world he was best known for being a defendant, together with fellow dissident writer Yuly Daniel, in the notorious 1966 show trial that signaled the end of Khrushchev's thaw and gave impetus to the burgeoning dissident movement. But while that trial made him a hero in the eyes of the liberal intelligentsia, many of his admirers turned against him in 1993, when he cosigned a letter condemning then-President Boris Yeltsin for overreaching his powers by shelling the White House to end a standoff with the parliament.
The second of the letter's three signatories was Vladimir Maksimov, former editor of the traditionalist emige journal Kontinent. For almost two decades Sinyavsky and Maksimov had been irreconcilable adversaries, defining and defending opposite poles of the emigre political spectrum. Yet they felt strongly enough about the importance of speaking out as a united front that they put their years of enmity behind them. At least among the liberal intelligentsia, among the people who had stood most staunchly by Sinyavsky throughout the years, this turned out to be the most controversial -- and unforgivable -- act of his controversial career.
In February 1997, almost exactly a year before his death, Sinyavsky gave a series of lectures at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University which were later published in the book "The Russian Intelligentsia." He took the opportunity to analyze what he viewed as the disheartening and dangerous failure of the intelligentsia to play its necessary role in Russian political life -- a failure stretching back, in Sinyavsky's view, to the early decades of the Soviet period. Challenging the sacred martyrology of the Soviet intelligentsia, Sinyavsky documented the intelligentsia's seduction by proximity to power, drawing parallels in this respect between the periods of Stalin and Yeltsin, citing old newspapers and naming names -- some of them among the most revered. He concluded by lamenting, "We do not have a normal concept of power. We do not understand that power is not a tsar, not God and not the 'father of the nation,' that power is replaceable -- periodically and regularly replaceable."
Recently, a Russian commentator maintained that it is precisely the intelligentsia that makes Russia "abnormal." If anything, Sinyavsky's vision of the intelligentsia was in at least one respect too rosy. He reserved his criticisms for the intelligentsia of the Soviet period, chastising it for failing to live up to the two roles -- that of opposition to the state and defense of the people -- that had defined it as a group before the Revolution. Sinyavsky's positive vision of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia is understandable, not only because he grew up in that milieu himself, but because he lived up to the intelligentsia ethos and mythos as much as any figure of his generation.
Yet we should not forget that that very 19th-century intelligentsia spawned some of the world's first and bloodiest terrorists, including the earnest and fanatical students, among them the brother of the man who would become Lenin, who threw bombs at Russia's highest political figures in the twilight decades of tsarism. Those terrorists of over a century ago resemble today's even bloodier and more fanatical terrorists in one respect -- both were and are the offshoot of societies that offered their best and brightest, their most educated young people, no prospect of a satisfying and useful role in the country's political process.
There was then a fatal contradiction inherent in the very origins of the Russian intelligentsia, and it is that contradiction which makes them The Intelligentsia, gives them their aura and sense of group coherence, rescues them from being just your average garden-variety intellectuals. On the one hand, the intelligentsia were from the beginning by definition excluded from the direct and effective exercise of power. I am not the first to point out that this exclusion from power allowed them to dream utopias, yet as they never had the possibility, necessity or responsibility of testing their ideas in practice, their utopias became dystopias when realized. In the best of cases, in mature democracies, the existence of a healthy civil society allowing citizens access to meaningful political participation hones practical and professional skills that are lacking to this day among Russia's intelligenty.
On the other hand, Russian rulers, from at least Catherine the Great up to the present day, have taken the intelligentsia, and especially the writers among them, seriously. Pushkin announced in one of his most famous poems, "The Poet is a Tsar." Indeed, Nicholas I was worried enough about Pushkin's power to mobilize opposition even in death that he had the poet's corpse spirited out of St. Petersburg in the dead of night to prevent demonstrations. Stalin made personal phone calls to Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov, Yeltsin granted Alexander Solzhenitsyn an audience after his return from exile, and even Putin has visited the Nobel Prize-winning author at his home to discuss the state of Russia. This contradiction -- between exclusion from power and aura of authority -- rendered the Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia vulnerable in precisely the ways Sinyavsky diagnosed.
Itar-Tass Writing under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky parodied the Soviet system. But the system got its revenge by sentencing him to seven years in prison in 1966. |  | |
Yet another peculiarity of the Russian intelligentsia underlies Sinyavsky's argument. Membership in the intelligentsia is defined precisely by the coherence of the group and, moreover, by its relationship to other notional entities, whether the people or the state. This is yet another fatal flaw, and a place where Sinyavsky himself parted company with the intelligentsia. Group identities encourage group ways of thinking and fundamentally subvert the autonomy of the lone, individual intellectual who reserves the right to differ from other members of the group. In crossing party lines to join forces with Maksimov or to give interviews to the nationalist newspaper Zavtra, Sinyavsky was, by intelligentsia lights, unpardonably breaking ranks. Yet he was making a point that should sober thinking people in Russia today -- and Democrats and Republicans in the United States as well.
Of course, naysayers have been declaring the Russian intelligentsia dead for at least a century, going back to the "Landmarks" (Vekhi) anthology published by disaffected Marxists in 1909. And in Russia today it sometimes appears that little is left of the public presence of the intelligentsia except their fictional incarnations in Alexandra Marinina's detective novels. Moreover, I must admit -- despite my own great respect for the best representatives of that tradition and my nostalgia for their defense of culture and civility in a world increasingly hostile to those values -- that perhaps the demise of the intelligentsia at this point in Russia's history is not such a sad development. Not, that is, if it clears the way for the appearance of a new generation of truly independent-minded intellectuals in the mold of Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky.
Whether you look from the United States or Russia, this seems like a particularly bad time to be an intellectual. People don't want to hear about how complex the world is, and those wielding political power are far likelier to turn for advice to almost anyone else -- rich people, celebrities, spin doctors, religious leaders -- rather than to the best-educated members of society. Yet as the trial of Socrates showed, the role of the intellectual in society was thankless even 2,500 years ago. Defending himself from charges of blasphemy, Socrates argued: "For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me."
Sinyavsky was just such a gadfly, nipping away at the tough hide of Russia. As he predicted, Yeltsin turned out to be eminently replaceable. Sinyavsky, by contrast, has not. Now, a dozen years after the Russian president's assault on his own parliament, the lesson to be learned is not so much that he was right to condemn the intelligentsia's support of Yeltsin. Rather, the lesson lies in why he was right. And, more to the point, it lies in the example he left behind.
At his own trial for blasphemy, Sinyavsky defended his right to be neither "for" nor "against," but simply "different." Let us hope that Russia will be blessed in the near future with more such loyal, difficult, insubordinate, trenchant and loving sons.
Catharine Nepomnyashchy is a professor of Russian Literature at Barnard College and director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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