Russian intellectual history was once viewed as a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. While some scholars traced its origins back to the later eighteenth century, most identified the early-mid nineteenth century as the period when debates about society, politics, and religion gathered force. Those debates ended in 1917, more specifically 1922, when the famous Philosopher’s Steamship transported artists and academics of all stripes into exile. Ostensibly, the intelligentsia was no more, even if Soviet universities continued to churn out every type of specialist. As Sibelan Forrester and Olga Partan note, history repeats itself. Their mission is to explore the patterns of reocurrence from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, and that is what makes their volume valuable and innovative.

Defined as a “well-educated social class engaged in complex intellectual labor” (xi), the intelligentsia survived or regenerated to become the “new technical intelligentsia” of the 1920s to 1980s. In that regard, Russia and the Soviet Union were hardly unique. Forrester describes Thaw-era science fiction writers, trained in fields from astronomy to paleontology as “future-oriented, dedicated to technological progress,” and relatively optimistic (235, 242), qualities one might identify with technical elites anywhere. Perhaps habitus set them apart. Alexandra Smith and Sofya Khagi highlight a voracious hunger for reading, an “absolute necessity,” even considered a “heroic deed” in the 1960s and 80s (266–67; 293). This may explain why Russia’s “thick journals” repeatedly survived lean times, from the 1840s through perestroika. Gary Hamburg shows that editors passed down core expectations, such that content must cohere with “science,” and that they must serve a maximally broad readership—the “toiling majority” (172, 179–80).

An older approach to the intelligentsia centers on dispositions, rather than education levels. Isaiah Berlin, Marc Raeff, and Martin Malia defined it as a class “alienated” from society and state, and alienation is invoked frequently, suggesting it is an indispensable part of the scholar’s toolkit (xxvi, 32, 40, 153–55, 195). Avoiding the word but replicating its spirit, Marcus Levitt figures eighteenth-century writers as “committed to serve what they considered society’s good yet frustrated by official constraint from above as well as lack of support from below” (3). No less venerable is identification of the intelligentsia as the “conscience of the nation,” defending a “sacred moral order” (xxvi, xiv). As Konstantine Klioutchkine observes, it emerged with the populists of the 1860s, who proclaimed a special “moral responsibility” borne by educated people by virtue of their “debt” to the working masses (35). The point was not that people holding higher educational degrees were morally superior, but that they ought to be better than they were. Decades later, the Thaw-era technical elite continued to invoke “high standards of morality and behavior” (238). Lastly, there is the classic image of the intelligent as “critically thinking,” and “free-thinking,” which reappears in multiple chapters (xx, 63, 249, 290–91).

These dispositional qualities, from alienation to critical thinking, have been invoked so often, and for so long, that some scholars have dismissed them, not only as a myth, but a self-delusion. They are mistaken. Proof is the intelligentsia’s equally long-standing practice of assailing one another for failing to live up to all the expectations outlined above. Michael Denner and Olga Sobolev both discuss the famous case of Vekhi in 1909, which scandalously excoriated the intelligentsia for sacrificing freedom of judgment in favor of the stultifying repetition of moral maxims and political slogans. The attack was itself moral in nature, as were the dozens of irate reviews it received (152). Vekhi’s criticisms were not new. Svetlana Evdokimova notes that Chekhov anticipated a few; he was generally known for representing intelligentsia types as “whining and spineless” (81, 85). Lev Tolstoi took a different line, as Michael Denner notes: by building their identity around opposition to the state, intelligentsia rebels structured it as a mechanism of violent repression (66). Curiously, Alexandra Smith observes a very similar critique in Tatiana Tolstaia’s 2000 novel, The Slynx (271). Most telling, however, is the tradition of intergenerational attack described by Sofya Khagi in her analysis of novels by Viktor Pelevin and Lyudmila Ulitskaia. They captured how the fathers of the shestidesiatnik generation were eviscerated by their sons, much as Ivan Turgenev and Fedor Dostoevskii showed of fathers and sons in the 1860s (308). To borrow her metaphor of insect metamorphosis (298), we see that each generation, emerging from its cocoon, replicates the impulses of its great grandparents.

To briefly name the volume’s chief weaknesses: the editors and authors might have explored continuities more systematically, including by attending more to previous scholarship.